This pioneering independent effort to assess the state of India's public services from a user's perspective brings together the responses of citizens from 37,000 rural and urban households on the delivery, quality, and responsiveness of public services. While the state's monitoring of service delivery seldom goes beyond tracking public expenditure and physical outputs, this study fills that gap and provides unique benchmarks with respect to five basic services: drinking water, primary health care, primary education, public distribution of food, and public transportation across the major states.