Hanoi is taking action to improve administrative and governance efficiency in order to proactively meet the needs of local residents and thereby raise its Provincial Governance and Public Administration Performance Index (PAPI) ranking in 2020 and the years to come.

With 41.53 out of a total of 80 points, Hanoi’s position in the 2019 PAPI remained unchanged from 2018, at 59th of the 63 provinces and centrally-run cities in the country.

Facing this, Chairman of the Hanoi People’s Committee Nguyen Duc Chung recently requested that all-level authorities and sectors in the capital work harder to promote performance in all eight sub-indexes: people’s participation at local levels, transparency, vertical accountability, corruption control, public administrative procedures, public service delivery, environmental governance, and e-governance.

In particular, he asked authorities and sectors to organise appropriate activities so that people can be involved in political, economic, and social matters and exercise their right to mastery, helping improve efficiency in policies and law enforcement.

They also need to ensure transparency in the decision-making process, take on people’s opinions, denunciations and questions, and deal with public opinions in line with regulations.

Meanwhile, accountability to the public must be enhanced, Chung said, and he demanded more efficient contact methods between the administration and the people, better reception of citizens, and the effective settlement of opinions, complaints, and denunciations.

He urged intensifying the fight against corruption in all-level administrations and during the provision of public services, especially healthcare, education, and recruitment at State agencies.

Authorities and sectors in Hanoi were also told to improve the handling of administrative procedures in State administrative units, in particular procedures relating to notarisation, construction licensing, the granting of land use right certificates, and commune-level administrative services.

The quality of essential public services must also be raised, including public healthcare, primary education, basic infrastructure for electricity and clean water supply, transport, waste management, and social order, he added.

He also required relevant agencies to be serious in environmental governance and to carry out solutions to improve the living environments.

Demanding stronger efforts in e-governance, Chung requested relevant agencies further assist the local population in accessing the city’s e-portal and fulfil their responsibilities in replying to public opinions via the portal.

The Hanoi People’s Committee has assigned the Department of Home Affairs to examine municipal agencies while not neglecting those at the commune level, the chairman said, noting that the city will devise detailed PAPI criteria for commune-level People’s Committees.

Meanwhile, administrations at the district and commune levels must increase inspections of their subordinate units and swiftly address errors and shortcomings.

Hanoi authorities are also going to step up administrative reforms and eliminate unnecessary procedures in order to create optimal conditions for people and businesses and attract more investment.

Despite a modest PAPI ranking, Hanoi still stood second among the 63 localities in the Public Administration Reform (PAR) Index for three straight years, from 2017 to 2019.

To sustain and further promote this result, the municipal People’s Committee has asked local agencies to maintain their performance in the sub-indexes they have earned high scores while striving to boost the others so that the city will top the PAR Index list this year.

The 2019 PAPI report, released by the UN Development Programme, interviewed 14,138 people randomly selected in all 63 cities and provinces. The Mekong Delta provinces of Ben Tre and Dong Thap and northern Quang Ninh province, respectively, topped the rankings.

The report found that even before Vietnam became affected by COVID-19, poverty, economic growth and the environment were top concerns of citizens in the country

It also highlighted that the country made encouraging progress in governance and public administration performance to address citizens’ needs in the past year and delivers key insights into a broad spectrum of reform areas across nearly a decade. This stock taking will help inform decision-makers in 2020 – a pivotal year that will shape Vietnam’s future development agenda.

The voices of 131,501 citizens have been heard in annual PAPI reports since 2009./