Does Governance Connect with Public Affairs Holistically? Subaltern Citizen's-Voice, Impaired Governance and Development Paradigm

With a question whether governance reflects the Public affairs, this article tries to examine mainly at micro level, the public policy, governance and institutional aspects of development monitoring. It undertakes a critical review that would meticulously assess the effectiveness of citizen's voice in measuring the governance quality and quantity using citizen report card (CRC). This article carries out a comparative longitudinal analysis over retrospective secondary data from CRCs on public service delivery in Indian city context conducted in four different time periods (the years 1994, 1999, 2003 and 2011) over a span of 17 years. Within the broad public service arena, 3–4 different basic services are analysed taking important citizen governance variables such as citizens’ expectation, satisfaction on service and staff behaviour. The analysis will carry out multi-dimensional comparison of service components across time and service providers. The expected output of this analysis provide a comprehensive knowledge about differential in the level and nature of participation of citizens (users) by different service types and changes by time periods in a given geographical area, which has a bearing on the governance quality (including staff behaviour, champions vs. poor performers). This article thus contribute towards understanding the importance of citizen's participation as well as its effectiveness in monitoring the governance and in turn present a case for innovative ways to overcome the monitoring challenges of developing the new development agenda in any typical democratic set up. This article also pose questions before critiques and program people to dig out the concept of democracy in terms of what roles various stakeholders would play when the citizen's participation emerges to be a major concern.