Public/Civil Service Values

Story hook

It is October 2005, Madhya Pradesh. Aruna Roy, a 1968 IAS officer who resigned in 1975 to work with rural communities, leads MKSS — Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan, into a "jan sunwai" (public hearing) in Bhilwara district. A construction project — a new village road — was sanctioned at ₹14 lakh. The records read 100% completion. The villagers, standing on the dust where the road should be, point and laugh. The records were signed by the Block Development Officer, the Junior Engineer, the Sarpanch. No road existed. ₹14 lakh had vanished into a chain of signatures.

That single public hearing — repeated across thousands of villages — became the political pressure that produced the Right to Information Act, 2005. Aruna Roy + Nikhil Dey + Shankar Singh of MKSS, Aruna Bagchi, and many others spent 14 years in that fight (1990-2005). The RTI Act came into force on 12 October 2005. In its first decade, 30 million RTI applications were filed by citizens. Of these, ~70% extracted information; ~30% were denied or unanswered.

The Act didn't create accountability — it operationalised a constitutional value that had been silently degraded since 1947. Article 32 + Article 226 + Article 311 + Article 19(1) (a) had always promised accountable government; the RTI gave the common citizen a daily tool to enforce that promise. Responsiveness — the willingness of government to listen and act on citizen voice — became the new operational frontier.

For the UPSC candidate, public/civil-service values are the collective institutional ethic — the cultural infrastructure that makes individual virtues like integrity and impartiality sustainable. Without supporting institutional values, even high-integrity officers burn out.

Why this matters for UPSC

Asked directly in 2015, 2017, 2019, 2021, 2023, 2024 under stems like "Discuss the role of accountability and responsiveness in public service"; "What is the difference between accountability and responsibility?"; "How can citizen charters enhance government responsiveness?" Prelims is GS-IV-only, but Interview boards probe these through every governance question — "How would you make your office more accountable?"