Samudāya — An Introduction

Published in

Global Shapers Bangalore

3 min readJul 2, 2018

By Siddarth Pai

Civic participation amongst youth (ages 18–45) in countries like India is low not because of citizen apathy, but due to the lack of access to information in a manner that’s intuitive to a millennial’s mind. The vast amount of information is to be marshalled into a form that’s digestible to the youth, and via a medium, they’re familiar with.

The lack of citizen participation in the election process muffles their voice and makes them silent spectators to the degradation of the cities and spaces they inhabit. The inability for them to find the right information in a timely manner in order for them to exercise their franchise is what we’re aiming to solve.

There’s no dearth of information for exercising one’s franchise, be it online or offline. But they exist in a fractured manner that requires tremendous effort from the seekers to find crucial data. Some of the websites are Byzantine to navigate and access information from. Yet India has the second highest number of Facebook users in the world at 213 million, with 70% between 18–35 years. Creating Messenger Bots that can guide them in registering as voters, verifying details, or getting access to government schemes can immensely improve civic participation in this age bracket. Using technology to break this barrier and present it in a familiar format can empower armchair activists to become active participants in the civic processes.

This lead the Global Shapers Bangalore chapter to develop Samudāya.

Samudāya consist of a Facebook Messenger Bot programmed to answer any queries anyone may have on voting, including what a Voter ID is, how to apply for one, the procedure, where the closest poll booth is, etc. It runs several AI, Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning (ML) models which give us in-depth analytics in what the most common questions voters have, which in turn can help inform any efforts by the Government or social groups to increase civic participation.

Our reasons for using are bot are simple:

· By using a chat interface, we lower the barrier to use as it’s the most common and natural ways of communicating with friends over the internet.

· By using Facebook, of which 213 million Indians are active users, we’re increasing the means of accessing this information whenever they want, wherever they want.

Let’s create a government of the people, for the people and accessible by the people.

About Global Shapers:

The Global Shapers are a World Economic Forum Initiative to build a global community of outstanding young people committed to improving the state of the world. With its motto ‘Shape Your Future’ — integrating personal, community and global dimensions — the Global Shapers Community is a global movement of young people, influencing positive change through dialogue and action.

The Bangalore Chapters consists of a small group of passionate Bangaloreans who subscribe to these principles and to the quote by Margaret Mead — that nothing can stop a small group of citizens fostering change, for they’re the only ones who succeed.

Samudāya — An Introduction

Written by Siddarth Mohan Pai