Solving India’s most pressing challenges with civic tech
Several issues across India — the deteriorating air quality in Delhi, the crumbling infrastructure in Mumbai, the many gaps in service delivery among local governments — all point to significant challenges in governance across the country. At the same time, citizens’ aspirations are growing dramatically and expectations for quality of life look completely different than they did even a few years back. Unfortunately, governments haven’t been able to keep up with this evolution due to underlying issues such as inadequate staffing, opaque processes with little to no citizen inputs, and poor public service delivery infrastructure, and the country is seeing large gaps between the interests of citizens and relevant public action.
Civic tech has emerged globally as a promising approach to address such issues. Civic tech can be used either to enable citizens to engage with government and/or each other to drive participation in public decision-making processes; or it could consist of tech solutions used by governments to improve the efficiency or effectiveness of public service delivery. This latter category is also often labelled govtech.
Civic tech was born from optimism about the potential of technology and data to improve government, empower citizens, and drive social impact. At Omidyar Network, we believe that unleashing entrepreneurial creativity towards addressing these civic challenges will likely yield better and more durable solutions to these issues. It will also aid public involvement in critical decision-making processes. The use of civic tech can thereby help dramatically improve delivery of services to citizens and refine the government’s overall responsiveness to civic issues.
We also believe that the civic tech market in India is poised to grow — entrepreneurs are beginning to engage on tough civic problems with the backing of committed government partners. Enabling the emergence of this ecosystem is the fact that citizens are increasingly using technology. Over 175 million smartphone users are expected to come online over the next five years, and government and civil society organizations are actively driving digital literacy programs. Government initiatives such as the Digital India program will ensure further support. These enabling factors suggest that the time is ripe to bring about a quantum change in the quality of governance through the use of civic tech.
Over the years we have partnered with the eGovernments Foundation (eGov) and with Janaagraha on their pioneering civic tech initiatives in India. eGov has built deep expertise in municipal governance through its work with close to 700 cities across India. It has distilled this expertise into an open source Urban Governance Platform, which is a powerful API and data rich platform to enable city governments to rapidly go online and drive dramatic improvements in quality and speed of delivery of citizen services. In a recent citizen survey, almost 80% of respondents reported improved service levels from government after eGov’s product was implemented. Even more impressively, over 80% of municipal staff respondents reported a significantly improved ability to respond to citizens and reported that the technology allowed them to save as many as 19 hours each week by streamlining processes.
Janaagraha runs a web platform I Change My City, which has emerged as India’s premier social change platform, enabling citizens to post a complaint about a civic problem such as a pothole or unattended garbage, prioritize the complaints that matter, and have local civic authorities review and resolve the issues. It was cited among 23 global civic tech platforms studied in the World Bank’s recent report Civic Tech in the Global South. The platform powered the Swachhata mobile app in collaboration with the central government and is the official web platform of the Government of India’s flagship sanitation mission, the Swachh Bharat Mission. Since its launch in August 2016, the Swachhata app has logged over 26 million complaints from over 7 million citizens across 2,100 cities with an over-90% resolution rate. Today, over 8,000 engineers are trained to use the Swachhata app to resolve complaints real-time.
All this amounts to real, visible change in governance. We have rarely witnessed such large scale civic participation in cities before — civic tech has been the key enabler.
To build on all this momentum, we are now launching an accelerator program in partnership with Village Capital that will help train and invest in early-stage civic tech ventures in India and will bring together entrepreneurs, influencers, the government, and potential funders, through forums and workshops. Following an intensive five-step process, the Civic Tech India 2018 Accelerator program will select a cohort of 6–12 ventures using VIRAL, a proprietary evaluation framework developed by Village Capital.
The selected cohort will receive support and training over a period of three to five months to hone their expertise, refine and improve their business models, and increase their scalability and impact. This program has been designed to encourage Indian entrepreneurs to develop solutions to tackle the country’s toughest civic and social challenges across areas such as infrastructure, education, health, sanitation, governance, and administration, among others.
We expect this program to help grow the civic tech sector in India by drawing in more entrepreneurs, funders, citizens, and government partners into the space. A dedicated accelerator will help in discovering and supporting startups focused on solving for these challenging issues. It can help these organizations in moving towards growth, scale and investment-readiness, and most importantly, towards delivering strong impact on pressing civic issues.
