Team Anna’s political party and Lok Satta (of Dr JP)

August 3, 2012 lokpal
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Anna’s team should embrace Dr JayaPrakash Narayan’s Lok Satta political party

Anna team’s intention to start a political party is based on extremely noble intentions and everybody is wishing that they can come and change the rules of the game of politics and winning elections.  As of today,  Anna’s team is a group of extremely honest people who just talk straight from the heart and talk common sense.  But running a national political party and winning elections is an extremely complicated task.  It is difficult even for an ideal party with all honest people as no two (even honest) people will agree on everything and India is a huge diverse country and at times, with contradictions.

A political party needs to have

  • a manifesto which talks about their views on important sectors and issues of the nations
  • an organizational structure which scale to a national level while being open and democratic internally
  • charismatic leaders who can capture the imagination of people and motivate them
  • a mechanism of raising and spending funds in a transparent way
  • people with intricate knowledge of the people and bureaucratic systems and experience in dealing with issues of country

In this context, one should seriously consider the Lok Satta party founded by Dr JayaPrakash Narayan.  Dr JP is an extremely honest politician, IAS (top 10 in batch of 1980),  former secretary to CM, had a major role in RTI, electoral reforms and a trained doctor!  He started a political party after initially trying to bring about a change from the outside with his Lok Satta NGO.

Dr JP always insisted that he is building a political platform for all honest and well intentioned people to come and bring about a change in the country.  Some of the salient points about Lok Satta Party is

  • Have a manifesto and a published their views/white paprts on all major issues on the country including health reforms, electoral reforms, nuclear energy, farmers issues etc.
  • Have strong internal democracy
  • Have an organizational based in 4+ states with a relatively strong base in Andhra Pradesh (where Dr JP is an MLA from Kukatpally constituency)
  • They place nation above party and party above individuals
  • Never indulge in caste or religion based politics

Given that Lok Satta has already bootstrapped the first level of a  honest political party and a sound political platform, I think team Anna’s team should embrace join and expand Lok Satta.  This will bring about the power of synergies between these two honest groups and will propel them in the political space quickly and give the required solid footing.

Wishing Anna’s Team and Lok Satta success in their efforts

– gopi

ps: I support Anna’s team in their demand for Jan LokPal and also support  Dr JP and the Lok  Satta political party for the honest political party that he founded.

Jan Lokpal : proposed anti-corruption bill by citizens

April 13, 2011 gov2.0 / lokpal
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LokPal is one of the most important bills that is being debated in post independent India.  The other bill which had wide ramifications and got enacted was the “Right to information act 2005″.

I feel this is one of the most important bill in the history of India and will have an everlasting impact on the way our government functions and will even accelerate our economic progress.

When RTI bill was enacted, some of the my friends said that it will stop corruption.  In the context of CitizenSocial and open government data, some suggested that we use RTI to get data and publish it through citizensocial.  I have  in the past, used RTI both for solving our locality issues and at a personal level, to get our passport renewed !  With this little experience, I always felt that RTI was meant to provide access to information which citizens wanted which is different from acting on corruption. 

This is where Lokpal bill comes into picture.  Lokpal bill, if enacted with all the terms that civil society is demanding, will create  institutions which are

  1. independent
  2. have power to act.
  3. have responsibility to take time-bound action

Currently, we have CBI, CVC at the center, lok-ayuktas, ACBs in states which were responsible for investigating the corruption.  The issues was that these were either not independent (CBI has to take permission from the government to act against MPs) or lacked power.  Justice Venkatachalam of  Lok Ayukta in karnataka unearthed many scams but the government never acted on them nor punished the guilty.

Jan Lokpal bill, the citizen version of the lokpal bill is trying to achieve all the three points mentioned above, taking cognizance of the strengths and weaknesses of the existing anti-corruption institutions.  Next 4 months are extremely important for India when the lokpal draft will be debated by a wide cross section of the society as it goes to parliament for approval.

Let us all be vigilant, participate in the process and ensure that we will have excellent institutions : Lokpal (center) and Lok Ayukta (states)  which will strengthen democracy, reduce corruption and ensure progress of India.

In the next four months, we will be doing various activities around increasing citizen participation and awareness around Lokpal bill .  Watch out http://www.citizensocial.com for updates on  this

– Gopi

CitizenSocial @ ETNOW

October 30, 2010 civic issues
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We were selected for ET NOW Entrepreneur’s huddle today at TIE-ISB event.   CitizenSocial and two more companies were chosen for their innovative concept for the ET Now show.  It was a 40 minute shoot which is going to aired (mostly probably on 9th Nov @ 10:30PM on ETNOW)

We got to present the concept of citizensocial and why we think it will help us transform the socieity.  There was an instantaneous applause when we said that we launched the site on Aug15th (yes, I still feel very senti about the launch date).  We then got to seek help from our fellow entrepreneurs in the hall on how we can tackle the most important task that we need to solve.  For citizensocial, our high priority task is how to get citizens know about our site and make it easy for them to report.

The response was awesome.  I will list our some of the suggestions that people gave us:

  • Let people report over mobile  [yes, we are just waiting for our longcode and we will be posting an update on mobile support soon]
  • Encourage the people by giving them points on  the site [I think it is an excellent idea and we will spec it out soon]
  • Have a game on the site to let citizens choose, say the dirtiest place in the city [it's a completely out-of-the-box idea and very interesting idea]
  • Work with NGOs and other initiatives (India2020) [Going to follow this up with the gentleman who extended his complete support]
  • Work with MBA schools [this is an excellent idea and going to follow up]
  • Give the reporting solution to opposition counclillors or opposition parties [ !!]
  • Work with the influencers in the communitiy who are very proactive in following up local issues [thanks mamta]
  • Get officials to assure people that they are going to fix the issues [well, we would like to,  I mean, who doesnt, but I guess it will time for this]

and many more..  It was great to get help from fellow entrepreneurs.  Many thanks to Sudhir Syal for hosting such a wonderful event and inviting us.  And ofcourse, thanks to everybody in the hall for their amazing suggestions.

–gopi

Response to CitizenSocial at TIE-ISB

October 30, 2010 civic issues
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CitizenSocial concept was well received today at the event.  We went with posters of ”India goes Gov2.0 with CitizenSocial” and actual screentshots of the site.  It was a very humbling experience to see so many people encouraging us and wanting us to succeed.

We had a government official (head of a dept in AP) who was really happy to see us doing it and extended his full help to citizensocial. There were students who took citizensocial stickers to put it on their bus.  There were geeks who had similar thoughts and were very happy to see us doing it .  There were people who liked our site name.  and ofcourse, last but not the least, there were investors and others who wanted to help us !

I am looking forward to the day two (tomorrow) of the event and interact with more people and get feedback from the people

thanks to everybody for the great feedback .

posted some of the photos of the event below

–gopi

[we had a TV show, more on that in my next blog in a few minutes]

CitizenSocial @ TIE-ISB

October 26, 2010 news
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We are excited to be taking part in the India’s most exciting annual networking event for entrepreneurs and investors, the TiE-ISB Connect ’10

We will be showcasing our CitizenSocial platform and Gov2.0 tools that we have been developing.  We will be putting up a stall in the event and we invite all of you to drop by and give your suggestions and feedback.

Since the launch of CitizenSocial, we received tremendous feedback from the citizens and we have been trying to incorporate the feedback into our platform.  We will be sharing these experiences in the event.  We will also be presenting our Gov2.0 tools at the event.  (to understand Gov2.0, refer to our prev blog post on Gov2.0)

I will be joined by my  colleagues Indrajeet and Mithun (who is coming down from bangalore).  See you all the TIE-ISB

– gopi

What is Gov2.0 and why now

October 26, 2010 gov2.0
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There has been lot of attention and hype over Gov2.0 and what constitutes gov2.0.  I will try to describe this in layman terms on what is Gov2.0 and more importantly, why now

Democracy is all about people coming together and collectively deciding what is good for them and getting it done.  This essentially means that every citizen has a right and responsibility to be a part of the system by voicing their opinion and taking part in various activities.  Though this is the ideal goal, it was practically impossible to handle mass participation of citizens in day to day matters.  Given the practical considerations, nearly all the democracies had to trade-off some of the citizen participation goals in order to getting the system working.  This meant the following:

  • Representative democracy : Choose few representatives (by way of elections) whose voice is expected to be the citizens’ voice for their complete elected term
  • Closed Administration : Have an administration and expect them to take care of implementing all the needs of the country
  • Closed data : With all the work done in paper or closed tools (pre search days), data was essentially locked up in the confines of government offices

All the above meant that citizens essentially had no choice but to “vote” their representatives, “pay” their administration and expect them to run the state

In the last few decades, primarily driven by technology changes, we have seen massive changes in what is possible in this area

  • Connected people : With ubiquitous Internet, mobile and social networks, people are more connected than ever before.  People are able to reach out to millions of people at one click and have a two way dialogue.
  • Crowd Sourcing : Internet has enabled crowd-sourcing, a way of getting small inputs from individuals of the crowd resulting in huge ouptut as a collective force.  Thus, crowdsourcing is enabling the people to take part in the works which were once considered a pure “administration” work and outside the bounds of citizens.
  • Massive data processing: Extremely cheap storage and processing costs, search, rss feeds, linked data have made publishing of gov data easy, cost effective which can be consumed by humans and machines (linked data, semantic web etc)

Thus, we have the following transition towards and open government involving citizens in a open and transparent manner leading us to Gov 2.0

Towards Gov2.0

Government data should be open

October 15, 2010 civic issues / gov2.0
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We were trying to understand the development works in each area in our state.  All the works that are taken up go through a e-tendering process and the data is there in electronic form.  The data is not published in raw format, but instead accessible only over a portal which is

  • https based
  • no useful search
  • no notification support
  • some of the data is removed after a certain period (tender documents are blocked once the tender is closed !)

This essentially makes data useless as it violates all the three basic principles of open data:

Three Laws of Open Government Data (by David Eaves)

  1. If it can’t be spidered or indexed, it doesn’t exist.
  2. If it isn’t available in open and machine-readable format, it can’t engage.
  3. If a legal framework doesn’t allow it to be repurposed, it doesn’t empower.

There is so much of government data that is hidden behind ill-designed portals.  Most often, this is not due to any malicious intentions on the government part, it is just that the awareness of open data is not there.

Citizens can benefit tremendously if the data is available on which useful applications can be written.  Think of this case of development works, if the data was openly available:

  • We could intimate citizens of the development works in their area
  • We could provide comparison of works in various localities and understand where the money is being spent
  • Citizens can give feedback on their priorities for the development works
  • and many more..

At CitizenSocial, our endeavour is to enable citizen participation in local development and this  requires us to provide data to the citizens that they care about.  Open data is a very critical component of this effort.


Process for road works in GHMC

October 6, 2010 civic issues
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This is my understanding of the process from the informal talks that I had with GHMC officials and a bit of searching on the web.

The normal procedure for any relatively big repair (more than a lakh) seems to be the following:

  1. First, the EE (executive engineer) of the ward in which the road is damaged, inspects the area and takes stock of the status of the road.
  2. Then, they create a work order and make an estimate according to their internal guidelines (there are some GOs which talked about the norms for estimating work based on current costs).  My guess is based on the amount, they might have internal reviews on the work within the municipality(such as the revies with Dy Commissioner of the municipality to which the ward belongs or the commissioner of the zone)
  3. At this point, they send it for approval to GHMC  (remember, GHMC has finite budget and it is approved from a central place.  ie, there is no ward-wise or zone-wise budget).  Hencee, depending on the “perceived importance of the issue and the cost”, the work might be approved.
  4. Then, the work is posted and an online tender is called for.  This is typically done by the ward EE (executive engineer) of the municipality.
  5. There would obviously be a process around the tender such as inviting bids, going through them, approving them, security deposits, checking background of contractors etc and finally one of the bids will get approved  (most of the AP departments use http://eprocurement.gov.in/ for this purpose)
  6. The work is then awarded to the lower bidder
  7. Then the work is done by the contractor with periodic inspection from the officials of the ward/municipality/zone

This is obviously a complex process and there are bound to be execution issues at various points.

Hope this throws some light on how GHMC functions.  Though GHMC might have a lot of internal audit and review mechanisms, it will help if citizens are aware of these processes and take more interest in the functioning of their wards.  This would also act as a feedback mechanism to the officials and help them in prioritizing of the issues.

In my next post, I will touch upon the structure of GHMC

Experience with GHMC officials of our locality

October 5, 2010 civic issues
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I had a pleasant experience with the GHMC officials responsible for our locality.

I got their phone number from the website and told them of the problem of a road cut in our area which a lot of residents of the area would like to see fixed(refer to the link below)

http://www.citizensocial.com/issue/road-dug-up-for-cable-laying-opposite-rama-temple/38/

The official (Mr Ramesh Gupta, who is the executive engineer) was extremely cordial and said that they will fix the issue.  After sometime, Deputy EE (Mr Narsimha Rao) came to our apartment to enquire about the issue.

They have already temporarily filled the road cut and will be fixing it by putting in cement soon.  He confirmed the same today when I met him in his office.  He has in fact told me that even the road cut at the turning of the road will also be fixed as part of this.