In the specific institute where I have spent the last decade, there has been a tradition (there are signs of this tradition disappearing but I hope this is not true). The tradition was put in place by the founder of the institute, a rare Indian academician who has tried not to just decorate his CV with a bullet point that he spent time abroad at a prestigious institute or university of learning but has tried to bring the good points back home. In this tradition, a special committee is put in place known as a Scientific Advisory Committee. This committee comes to the institute ideally at regular intervals of time and every single professor, no matter the seniority, has to spend a day convincing the committee that they have been hard at work in maintaining the standards and achieving the milestones.
Now, this sounds like a normal affair. Of course every institute or organization must be having some structure in place to ensure that they are steering in the right direction. But what is different about this specific committee is that it is mandatorily (partially) comprised of individuals not belonging to the country. This ensures that there is a very fresh and hopefully critical perspective brought to the table during the course of the evaluation. I think this simple mandate is very effective because it takes the game to a whole new level and there is now an impetus on all people to deliver and perform.
Now, at the cost of sounding ignorant, there seems to be absolutely no mechanism in place to govern the basic services of the local bodies of Government. Every day I sit on my motorcycle and go out to work, I see the faults of the infrastructure. The road is worse than the figures of clay a three year old makes. The number of years it takes for something to be put in place is super unreasonable. And when that something is put in place, it is clear that it was put in place just for a photo-op sufficient enough to satisfy some lame authority who is paying lip service to the idea of serving the people.
A lot of youngsters ask me a question - what motivates me to keep raising the bar of the work I try to do! I don't know for sure how high the bar is but there is only answer I give - I try my best to hold myself accountable. I hold myself accountable to keep trying to do things atleast a 'delta' better than I did it the last time. I employ tools such as Root Cause Analysis (self taught and applied on a best-effort basis) to make a list of things that I felt went wrong the last time I worked on a project and trace out the reasons for those wrongs. I make a report, which is not shared with the world many a times, but I make it anyway. The objective of this report is to put it in my consciousness to do better the next time.
In my strong opinion, this is the ideal way by which one should do things. There should be no external factor which makes you perform a duty. But unfortunately, we don't live in an ideal world. The average person out there, atleast in my immediately sampled environment, does not seem to be self motivated. So, we need to put checks and balances in place which create a culture of accountability. And these checks and balances have to placed in such a way that there is no way to corrupt them.
I distinctly remember that the college where I spent my time in did not have any labs for Physics and Chemistry. And the crazy number of students that the college had given admissions to, I could imagine the size and the number of labs needed to cater to them. But no! There was no lab. But how could the local authorities allow a college to exist which did not have a lab that allowed people to do their lab work? Further, how is it that on the day of the so-called lab examinations, students would receive some marks? The answer is simple! The 'external' (a person who comes to conduct the lab exam and does not belong to the same college) creates a paper trail that shows for the records that such a lab exam indeed had been conducted and students were rewarded given marks.
This is a perfect example of the kind of check or committee that is useless. So, what would be a better approach? I think the answer lies in the law of probability. What is the probability that you can convince one person to look the other way? Say 'p1'. How about making the second person look the other way? 'p2'. Now, what is the chance that both will look the other way? If the two people are not related to each other in anyway, it would be 'p1 x p2'. And this is much lower than any individual chance. (Probabilities are numbers between 0 and 1, therefore when multiplied, diminish. 0.5 x 0.5 is 0.25, lower than the any of the two values.)
For those not mathematically oriented, what I am arguing is actually quite simple! The more the number of independent evaluators or checks you put in place, the harder it becomes to rig the system. And what is the largest number of evaluators you can put in place? Why, the whole world of course! Let yourself or your work be accountable to the rest of the world! And this is where open data access can help. Let the data about the service, the project etc. be as open as possible and you have a strong system of accountability.
Are you an institute? Let your goals, achievements and outreach statistics be publicly available on your web site. Are you a civic authority responsible for the roads? Let your goals on what road needs to be laid where and other relevant details be out in the open. You get the idea! I guess the other word for what I am advocating is 'transparency'. This automatically drives accountability. And of course none of this would matter if there are no consequences. If you have nothing to lose despite your dirty laundry being out in the open, then all you will create is a culture of shamelessness.