Srikanth Viswanathan of Janaagraha: What is preventing us from using tech to solve simple problems in Indian cities?

Janaagraha works with citizens and governments to transform quality of citizen engagement in neighbourhoods and quality of Infrastructure and services in cities. Their philosophy is simple. There are multiple challenges that Indian cities face – from potholes to pollution to inefficient waste management and poor infrastructure. These are all according to them the symptom of a bigger problem: poorly designed, ineffectual city systems, and if we were to keep attacking only the symptoms, the disease is never going to go away.

Srikanth Viswanathan is focussed on navigating the 20-year-old organisation through what he calls as the ever growing challenge of urban reforms.

It is rare for finance professionals to survive and thrive in the nonprofit sector, and Srikanth Viswanathan is an exception. A chartered accountant by profession, he joined Janaagraha after a ten year stint in Standard Chartered Bank and KPMG, and has since been with Janaagraha. In his seventh year as CEO, he is focussed on navigating the 20-year-old organisation through what he calls as the ever growing challenge of urban reforms.

The organisation’s focus is now on Civic Participation-Making it easier for citizens to actively participate in the governance of their cities, Municipal Finance – to improve the financial sustainability and accountability of cities and providing policy frameworks for improving city-systems and strengthening state capacities.

Srikanth spoke to Indianexpress.com on the challenges and opportunities faced by the nonprofit sector, tech and tools for citizen engagement, building of data centric platforms for municipal finance and the broader issues in adoption of tech by city governments.

Can you tell us about some of the key tech interventions by Janaagraha, and its impact?

Srikanth Viswanathan: We can break down our civic technology interventions into three phases. First was imagining and building civic tech tools and applications which were citizen focussed and which had a crowdsourcing component. IPaidABribe was one such award-winning platform conceptualised and built by Janaagraha. It was a unique crowd sourced corruption platform, where citizens could report on retail bribes paid by them. What started off as an online platform in India, was later replicated in over 20 other countries. IChangeMyCity was a citizen engagement platform for cities, where citizens could seamlessly connect with governments on their grievances with bad roads, pavements, garbage, street lights etc. and get them resolved. There were also hyperlocal data, neighbourhood budget and works tracking and participation features in the platform.

The second phase was where governments proactively sought out the I Change My City civic tech model from Janaagraha. The Swachhata platform, an instance of I Change My City, is the core grievance redressal platform of the Swacch Bharat Mission in urban areas, run by the Union Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs. It is an improved version of IChangeMyCity, focussing on grievance redressal and management of complaints related to Swachhata. It was built by us and managed for seven years pro bono before being handed over to the government, and has been used by close to 22 million citizens to address over 25 million grievances such as garbage dumps, street sweeping and public toilets. We also built and run the Public Eye tool of the Bengaluru Traffic police department for crowdsourcing traffic violations. Over 300,000 users in Bengaluru have used Public Eye to report over two million traffic violations like parking on footpaths and helmet-less driving, with an average resolution rate of over 70%, since 2015.

Third, we are now working to usher in radical transparency in municipal finance through http://www.cityfinance.in. Our vision is to transparently track the journey of every rupee earned and spent in India’s cities from inception to destination, i.e. from source of funds to outputs for citizens. http://www.cityfinance.in already hosts audited and unaudited annual accounts of over 3,000 cities in a comparable format with dashboards and analytics. This is unprecedented in India and a global best practice. This portal too is owned by the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs, Govt of India. And it is being done as part of a govt-led initiative. All these efforts were made possible through philanthropic capital and leadership in government .

In the field of urban governance and transformation per se, can you tell us about some tech-based initiatives that have worked and some which you think did not deliver as per your expectations.

Civic tech initiatives work well when there is a felt need in the government, and also when the government is able and willing to respond to crowdsourced information, data and complaints from citizens. For example, with IPaidABribe, though it was pioneering and award winning globally, there was not much enthusiasm or leadership in government to undertake process reforms and address retail corruption. It was perhaps ahead of its time. With IChangeMyCity, there was much better response to grievance redressal as some governments at least understand the need for resolving citizen grievances. However, its full potential has not yet been realised.

We think the full avatar of the ICMyC platform comprising not just grievance redressal but also hyperlocal data, mobile apps for municipal councillors to connect with citizens and engineers, and tracking of budgets and civic works, is yet to fructify. We would need leadership and ownership within the government for such an initiative to succeed. That is when the full potential of civic tech will be realised. We are positive and hopeful that it is only a matter of time before civic technology revolutionises participatory democracy in India’s cities.

http://www.cityfinance.in on the other hand has been adopted and scaled rapidly in a short time frame thanks to leadership in the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs, Govt of India (MoHUA). It now serves as a national framework of standardised, and credible financial information on India’s cities (urban local bodies). The platform hosts close to 10,000 annual accounts of over 3,000 municipalities (ULBs) in a standardised and comparable format. We are now looking forward to leveraging this and building more features for not just transparency and accountability, but to also unlock municipal borrowings and enhance revenue generation of cities. Not only MoHUA but cities and states too see value in http://www.cityfinance.in because it makes it easier for them to comply with grant conditions and access Finance Commission grants

Do you think city governments are collecting enough data for improving governance? Should there be more sensors and IoT devices collecting data in cities?

Yes, there could be a lot more data that could be collected by the government with sensors and IoT devices. No doubt about that. However, the key issue is whether governments have the capacities to process the data and use them in decision-making. A lot of the data that is already collected through the census, the National Family Health Survey, the Periodic Labour Force Survey, administrative data from water and sanitation systems, from CCTV cameras etc. is not being used effectively for decision making at the city level.

State capacity for data collection and utilisation will not grow organically. There has to be concerted effort put into it.

“Frankly, improved city governance is not a function of technology alone but innovation beyond technology too,” says Srikanth Viswanathan.

Can you explain how your Public Eye app works and how the response has been?

Public Eye facilitates citizen participation in reporting traffic violations through an aim-click-send model. Citizens can aim at a traffic violation, click a photo and send it to Bengaluru Traffic Police (BTP). The BTP confirms the violation and registration number and straightaway challans the violator. The citizen gets a message from the BTP once this is done. Their complaint is rejected if the BTP is not able to confirm the violation or the registration number of the vehicle from the photo. It is an extremely easy to use app.

Your work with citizen groups. Have they been able to use tech in ways to increase accountability and transparency in government?

We have seen individual citizens taking up tech to increase accountability and transparency. However, we are yet to see citizen groups per se taking to civic tech in a big way. It is all a question of whether the government is responsive and willing to take action on their needs and demands for their neighbourhoods. If the government is responsive, civic tech adoption will definitely improve. We are keen to pilot a municipal ward committee app for example, to both enable ward committee meetings and also bring in greater transparency in them.

Have non-profits been able to leverage tech in a proper way?

Nonprofits in India are beginning to leverage technology a lot more than before but I believe we may still be in the early stages. Nonprofits could do a lot more to enable and empower their strategy through technology, rather than just digitise processes or bring in limited efficiencies in workflows.

Have cities and municipal governments been able to leverage technology for resolving problems?

Cities and municipalities are using tech to a certain extent for transactional purposes, like collection of fees and taxes, issuing certificates, accounting and vendor payments and so on. However, it is not yet fully mobile friendly or light touch yet. Therefore, adoption is not at the same scale as say digital payments or even other consumer apps.

There is a lot of work going on in internal ERP systems of cities and some cities have made significant strides. There are also some islands of excellence in solving problems of digital payments, disaster management and Cowin.

But other than these islands of excellence, as far as cities are concerned, what we see is that for the most part they are merely digitising the existing legacy processes. There is no reimagination of city governance enabled by technology.

Frankly, improved city governance is not a function of technology alone but innovation beyond technology too. Cities must relook at urban services from a tech-enabled, distributed capacities model with progressively more private sector participation. What we at Janaagraha call Municipal Shared Services. For example, why can’t streetlights be fixed by a city government using an Urban Company like model? Why can’t gardeners or electricians needed for municipal services be sourced from the private market and rated and ranked? Technology can play a major role in fixing the issue of state capacities, when coupled with innovative models like Municipal Shared Services.

Should cities start having chief innovation officers and chief technology officers going forward?

Yes. There is a need for CTOs for cities with more than a million population. And perhaps for smaller cities, it could be at a district or cluster level. More importantly, the focus should shift away from mere digitisation of existing processes to leveraging technology to deliver citizen outcomes through superior organisational performance.

Note: The author was associated with Janaagraha in one of his earlier roles.