How Janagrahaa is changing the world with the power of inclusion
All of us want to change the things for the better. The opportunity is all around us especially in urban India where even basic infrastructure is a struggle. This intent gets multiplied when people come together for a cause and work collectively to see it through. Janaagraha, a non-profit run by Ramesh and Swati Ramanathan, has found a way to harness technology to generate citizen action.
IChangeMyCity
IChangeMyCity is a web-based social networking platform started by Janaagraha. It helps users come together and discuss on social issues. It provides in-depth information on civic issues, addresses of local offices in each neighbourhood and the details of elected representatives of that area. It offeres a map-based view of one’s locality, political boundaries(like wards), addresses of elected representatives, polling booths, nearest local civic agency. The site also helps people find out their quality of life, voter information, local groups working on improving urban quality of life and so on.
Resolving Civic Issues
One of the good things about the site is the complaints feature, which allows people to post their complaints regarding civic issues like apothole or a liquor shop causing nuisance, track other complaints on civic amenities in their neighbourhood, and participate in conversations within the community, and find solutions together.
People can register complaints either by visiting the website or by using their mobile app. For every complaint there are three tags (on the app) which indicate the action which is being taken on the complaint. Users can add value to a complaint by taking the picture and then posting it alongside and marking the area in which they are facing the problem.
After a user posts the complaint, it is then is then forwarded to the respective department and the action whcih is being taken on the complaint is updated on the site. For instance if there is a pothole near KFC, Indiranagar, people have to just click the picture and post the complaint. Also for every complaint there is an option tomention if you were affected by the complaint. If more number of people are affected by a complaint, it gets resolved much faster in comparison to other issues which ar posted.
I Change My Street
Recently, the Bangalore chapter of IChangeMyCity came up the concept of I Change My Street to clean and improve the streets of Bangalore. More than 10,000 school students from over 220 schools and parents, citizen volunteers, civic officials, teachers and elected representatives including nine MLA’s and 20 Councillors participated in the campaign.
The enthusiasm among the student community was very high, Surya HS, A IXth standard student of Sri Sai English School, said, “I have been looking forward to this day since we were informed about it. It is a really good initiative as the roads that we are cleaning will benefit everyone in the locality.”
People worked on activities ranging from laying the road, to putting up street benches and tidying up the nieghborhood and spreading door to door citizen awareness. This initiative led to over 50,000 signups on the IchangeMyCity page and the responses from public were equally great.
https://twitter.com/__prajakta/status/530566937106194432
On this occassion Swati Ramanathan, Co-founder Janaagraha said, “While we are busy inspiring our students to become doctors, engineers, teachers & scientists, we are not doing enough to inspire them to become active citizens. We need to guide our children towards taking charge of our neighborhoods and becoming agents of change. The IChangeMyStreet campaign will be an annual event in the Bangalore civic calendar.”