Faceless services reimagined public service delivery and offered it in an innovative manner to citizens using 21st century cutting edge-technology. Traditional ways of public service delivery in India involve excessing manual intervention and multiple physical interaction with government officials and citizens. Apart from causing long queues, huge backlog, and loss of precious time to both citizens and government officials, the situation also led to occurrences where public service delivery in states are also infected by interference of middlemen.

Frontier technologies such as artificial intelligence, feature mapping and biometrics-based authentication and identification etc. were optimally used for the first time by any state transport department in India to offer a fully faceless services to citizens eliminating any need of visiting transport offices except services such as driving skill test and vehicle fitness test, where it is essential.

Faceless services were launched in August 2021 when 33 services which account to 95% of total public services provided by transport department of Delhi Government were made completely faceless. These include - driving license and related services, vehicle registration, and related services, permit related services etc. Subsequently, remaining smaller services were decided to be made faceless in a phased manner as well.

Due to success of the initiative and warm reception by citizens, three more services were made faceless over time – Registration Certificate Printing at directly at vehicle dealership, Electric Vehicle Retro-fitment services, and Vehicle Hypothecation services. Troubleshooting of various existing faceless services have parallelly continued and Delhi Government have started deploying third party surveys to collect public feedback to further improve the service quality.

The 1st phase of faceless services was launched on pilot mode in February 2021. A serious of consultations with District Transport Officers (DTOs) were held for 2 months preceding launch of pilot. Next round of consultations was held with all district transport officials and citizens to absorb the feedback received from the pilot held for 5 months. Faceless services were finally devoted to citizens of Delhi in August 2021.

Faceless services have helped citizens save their precious time lost in long queues for availing public services. Due to contactless nature of services, citizens have been able to completely avoid physical interactions during COVID pandemic. The role of middlemen was also eliminated due to faceless services.

It also helped government officials reduce their time and effort required to process public service requests. In turn, pendency of service requests reduced substantially.

Nearly 2.2 million applications have been processed by Transport Department within one year of launch of ‘faceless services’. These include approximately 0.75 million applications for registration and permit related services, approx. 0.6 million applications for driving license related services, approx. 0.35 million applications for e-learning license services and approx. 0.46 million registration certifications that have been issued at vehicle dealership.

Most requested services such as renewal of driving license, driving license extract & hypothecation addition have clocked an unprecedented approval rate of over 95% and pendency for total application requests have stayed below 2%, signifying the efficacy of the services.

Daily service requests are monitored through a centralized database platform whereas a third-party survey is being deployed by the Government to collect the citizen feedback to strengthen the already establish infrastructure and processes.

Low level of digital literacy in citizens has turned out to be significant challenge in adoption of the services. For some of the public services such as automated driving skill test, learning curve towards adoption of newer technologies have been slower amongst citizens.

The challenge has been addressed through disseminating information about the service through training modules, interactive audio-visual learning tools, awareness campaigns, and with support of ‘mobile attendants (mobile sahayaks)’ who visit citizens’ households and provide support in accessing public services.

For some services, public officials continued to exercise their own discretion requesting submission of physical documents due to ambiguity in established SoPs. Transport Department has continuously consulted district transport officials to streamline the SoPs for such services to avoid any use of physical documentations and visits.

Strengthening and efficient functioning of digital infrastructure is critical for success of the project. The IT infrastructure deployed for faceless services need to be frequently upgraded given the large scale of datasets that is generated through the project.

Hiring and deploying competent human resources by the government to handle such datasets and technologies will also be critical for stability of the project.

Sustainability of the initiative will also depend on policy stability and guidance of progressive political leadership, continuously pushing the bureaucracy to reinvent innovative ways public services could be delivered.

Replication of ‘faceless services’ has been in two folds.

First, following the launch of faceless services, many state governments in India have launched similar services for the Transport Sector. Karnataka Government made 30 of its transport services contactless from 1st November 2021.

India’s Transport Ministry also came out with a notification on 16th September 2022 to offer 58 citizen-centric transport services in faceless manner to help citizens save their critical time and ease down their compliance burden.

Second, Delhi government, itself has been mulling over offering public services of its Revenue Department in a faceless manner. Given the significant benefits offered by faceless services to both citizens and government, it can be replicated in public sector institutions both nationally and internationally for efficient delivery of public delivery and enhanced trust between government and citizens.

By leveraging technological advancements, the delivery of public services can be simplified to bring benefits to citizens as well as the government, in turn engendering systemic transparency and efficiency. Apart from reducing the backlog and efficient utilisation of time for both citizens and government officials, technology can also help with reduction of corruption and bring in second order benefits such as a more constructive engagement between governments and citizens. However, sufficient structural preparation is necessary for successful implementation of initiatives that are predominantly rooted in technology and it can only be achieved through a participative consultative process pervasive across all relevant stakeholders.