ORTPSA and Odisha’s welfare delivery: Every day, citizens file applications for pensions, certificates or land records and watch them sink into “under process”. The phrase is treated as the usual inconvenience of dealing with a government office. It is more than inconvenience. It turns a legal entitlement into an administrative favour.
Right to public service laws were meant to end this ambiguity. They give citizens statutory timelines, appeal routes and penalties for delay. Odisha’s Right to Public Services Act has been in force since 2013. The state’s ORTPS portal lists 445 services across 32 departments. For each notified service, a designated officer is supposed to deliver within a fixed time. If the deadline is missed, the citizen can appeal.
The design is clear. No file should disappear without consequence.
READ I Migrant labour welfare needs portable benefits
Odisha welfare delivery
Odisha is worth examining because its welfare expansion has been large enough to change living conditions, but not always the citizen’s experience of the state. The multidimensional poverty headcount in Odisha fell from 29.34% to 15.68% between 2015-16 and 2019-21. The state lifted more than 62 lakh people out of poverty during the period.
That progress has increased the importance of routine administration. A pension, a scholarship, a caste certificate, an income certificate or a birth certificate can decide whether a household receives support on time. In rural Odisha, welfare is often the main source of income support, food security or access to services. The gap between a notified right and an accessible right is therefore not a procedural irritation. It affects household decisions. As Odisha’s welfare state has grown denser, the bottleneck has shifted from eligibility to delivery.
READ I Welfare rights, not freebies, must guide India
ORTPSA and the missing delay
On paper, a citizen facing silence has recourse. Under ORTPSA, a designated officer is named for every notified service. If the deadline passes, the citizen can appeal. If the appeal fails or is rejected, the citizen can seek revision. A delay can attract a penalty of up to ₹250 a day, while failure to provide a service without sufficient cause can attract a penalty of up to ₹5,000. All this assumes that a delay is recorded as a delay.
Fieldwork I conducted across Anandpur, Kapundi and Thakurmunda, through structured interviews with Common Service Centre operators, PRI officials and citizens, along with field observation, showed why this assumption fails. Very few citizens use the formal route. Most beneficiaries were not aware of the deadlines, appeal process, or penalties. A law built to respond to a recorded failure becomes weak when the failure leaves no record.
READ I Rising state debt: Welfare politics meets fiscal limits
Keonjhar and the birth certificate delay
In Keonjhar district, a sarpanch described a birth certificate application that had crossed its statutory deadline. There was no rejection. No logged delay. No entry for the appeal process to act on.
The application moved only after the sarpanch called the department. The certificate was issued a few days later. The citizen got the document, but the delay vanished from the record.
This is where ORTPSA loses force. The problem was solved outside the law. The official record showed no breach. The officer faced no consequence. The citizen learnt that the useful route was not appeal, but access to someone who could call the right person.
In other cases, the sarpanch was left to decide which application should be pushed first. That is a difficult burden to place on an elected local representative. Once applications are ranked by informal urgency, statutory timelines lose meaning. A right becomes a queue managed by influence.
Informal mediation in public services
The same pattern appeared across Common Service Centre transactions in Anandpur. Applications for birth and death certificates, income and caste certificates, pensions and scholarships often stalled. A CSC operator dealing with a citizen’s third visit, a ward member willing to call an official, or a sarpanch with departmental access could get the file moving.
The case was resolved before it became an appeal. This informal route is not part of ORTPSA. It is a social resource. Like all social resources, it is unevenly distributed. It depends on knowing whom to approach. It depends on that person being reachable, willing and able to intervene.
Kapundi, a forest-edge hamlet with a largely tribal population, shows the other side of this arrangement. Formal administrative reach is thin. A visit to a CSC takes more effort. Fewer outside officials visit. Directly approaching a department is not something every household can do with confidence. The same silence that a phone call resolved in one place may remain silence in another.
ORTPSA and administrative literacy
The failure is invisible to the people meant to monitor it. In interviews, most citizens and even several CSC operators could not describe ORTPSA’s statutory deadlines, appeal process or penalty provisions. The law’s existence was often as unrecorded in public knowledge as its violations were in official systems.
A village where an assertive sarpanch fixes every delay and a hamlet where no one fixes any delay can look identical in the record. Zero appeals. Zero penalties. No visible failure.
The data that should show where ORTPSA is weak can instead make the law look stronger than it is. Success secured through informal pressure and failure absorbed in silence both leave a blank trail.
Odisha’s move to introduce an Auto Appeal System is therefore relevant. If online applications are escalated automatically when deadlines expire, one source of invisibility can be reduced. But automatic escalation will not, by itself, solve the problem for citizens who do not know the deadline, cannot track the application, or depend entirely on a CSC operator to interpret the system.
ORTPSA needs more than a portal. Its deadlines must be visible at CSC counters, panchayat offices and service points. Citizens must know which services are covered, when the deadline expires, and where an appeal goes. CSC operators and PRI representatives need the same information, since they already mediate much of the citizen’s contact with the state.
More than a decade after ORTPSA came into force, the question is not how many services Odisha has notified. The question is whether a citizen with no sarpanch to call and no official contact nearby can still make the law act. Until that happens, service delivery will continue to favour those who know who to call.
Anugraha John is a Master’s student in Public Policy at O.P. Jindal Global University.