What is public policy?

Every day you use public policies without noticing: the roads, the traffic signals, clean tap water, electricity in your classroom, the public park and the garbage collection. Each is a public service made possible by a policy.

A policy starts with a problem. Suppose your school is littered with plastic bottles and wrappers. The principal talks with teachers, students and parents, and together they decide on a Plastic-Free Campus Policy: carry reusable bottles, avoid plastic bags, put out separate dustbins, hold monthly awareness programmes, and make teachers responsible for monitoring it. That is a policy: a plan of action, worked out in advance, to fix a problem and reach a goal.

Public policy is the same idea on a bigger scale: a plan of action that the government takes up to tackle problems that affect the public, meet people's needs and improve their welfare. It decides what to do, why, who does it, how, and how success will be measured. It is then checked through a feedback loop and changed if needed.

What makes it 'public'? (Fig. 4.4)

• it is for everyone;
• it is made by government;
• it uses public money from taxes;
• citizens take part in shaping it;
• it promotes public welfare: education, health, transport, sanitation, the environment, safety.

Not every policy is public. A school's mobile-phone rule, a company's work-from-home rule or a housing society's parking rule apply only to that one group. They are policies, but not public policies.

Who takes part? Not just the government. The book's Table 4.1 lists:

• Citizens: identify problems, vote, suggest, give feedback (residents ask for a zebra crossing near a school);
• Elected representatives (MPs, MLAs, local representatives): raise issues, make laws, approve budgets (an MLA raises a water shortage in the Assembly);
• Officials, departments and ministries: prepare and carry out policies (a district collector coordinates a scheme);
• Civil society, NGOs, experts and the media: study problems, suggest solutions, spread awareness, monitor (an NGO's water-saving campaign);
• the private sector: technology, resources, expertise (a company putting solar panels in government schools in a public-private partnership);
• international organisations: experience and support (the WHO helping control infectious diseases).