Improving the Quality of Service Delivery of Assistant Commissioner (Land) Office at Upazila Level in Bangladesh: An Assessment

The article assesses perceptions and expectations of citizens for improving the quality of service delivery of the Assistant Commissioner (AC; Land) office at upazila level in Bangladesh. It measures service quality gap by analysing the case of land service delivery in three AC (Land) offices through a questionnaire survey of 300 service recipients on the basis of purposive sampling. Using the principles and techniques of SERVQUAL, the research has found that the citizens’ perceptions did not comply with their expectations with regard to the quality of the service delivery of the AC (Land) office in the studied upazilas. In terms of the perceptions and expectations of the service recipients, negative service quality gap has been found in all five dimensions of the perceived service quality such as tangibility of facilities, reliability, responsiveness, assurance and empathy in land service delivery. In order to improve the overall quality of the land service delivery of the AC (Land) office, the policy makers should give priority to some principles such as combating corruption in land administration, providing services on time, acting on first come first serve basis, caring individual problems, clearing middlemen from the office premises, serving citizens with courtesy, introducing online service delivery systems and so on.