India needs smarter cities

The number of Internet users in India is tipped to reach 350 million by 2015, three times today’s number and 75% of new Internet users are likely to access the Internet through wireless devices. The number of mobile users will shortly cross the one billion mark with 65% of them being urban residents. Marry these forecasts with the deficit in urban infrastructure and service delivery, add the familiar angst of daily life in our cities, and what you get is the promise of digital governance as a change agent in urban India. On the one hand, cities are faced with yawning deficits in infrastructure and service delivery and the prospect of a population explosion in the next two decades. On the other hand, there is a severe shortage of both human and financial capital required to renew (rebuild in some cases) our cities and make them truly habitable. Digital governance brings three specific benefits to offset this problem—scale, cost and most importantly, citizen engagement.

In an environment, where tough choices need to be made and resources need to be allocated judiciously to competing priorities, governments and citizens need to engage at a city level to improve the quality of life in Indian cities. What G2C (government to citizen) engagement does is to ensure that resource allocation by governments is led by citizen priorities and on the citizen side there is better appreciation of resource constraints and the tough choices that need to be made by the administration. Only digital governance can facilitate G2C engagement, bringing about meaningful and practical democratic governance in cities, on a day-to-day basis. This is not least due to its singular ability to scale almost indefinitely, facilitate real-time and two-way engagement and host large data sets.

Several billions of dollars are being spent by governments in India on e-governance. What is critical to question is how citizen-centric are these expenditures and what are their end-user outcomes. At a city level, most e-governance efforts have centred on half-baked automation of back-end processes, building of websites and provision of limited online services through them. It is true that city websites, integrated with mobile applications and social media, have no credible alternative as the primary medium of digital governance in a city. However, websites of Indian cities have tended to be a one-way communication channel from governments to citizens. They are not products of a digital governance strategy which fully harnesses the triple benefits of scale, cost and citizen engagement. E-governance expenditures and efforts need to be benchmarked on their outcomes and cannot be assumed to be value additive. For example, New York City has over two million unique visitors visiting its website every month, while the website of the Municipal Corporation of Delhi, which was in the news recently for having an expenditure of ₹ 12 crore over the past several years, tells me I am visitor number 3,148,170.

Given India’s position as a leader in software and technology services, there is no reason why the websites of say, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation or Municipal Corporation of Delhi should be any less compared with those of London or New York. Why should we not gain real-time access to each financial and operational transaction of our cities’ municipal corporations? Why should we not be able to vote or express our preferences electronically on where and how we wish to see our money spent in our neighbourhoods? Why are we not able to trace the journey of sarkari files (with their tapes, of course)? The digital world is truly flat, and democratic. If New York can make available to its residents over 900 sets of municipal data, and to top it, also fund them to build apps using them, Indian cities can at least digitally disclose their data to begin with. For all we know, the technology powering many of these initiatives overseas may well trace their home to Bangalore, Pune or Gurgaon. Hackathons in these Indian cities can produce immense digital wealth for city governments with little investment. Geeks, for a change, can code for their cities.

While global cities have brought their governments to their citizens’ doorsteps, websites of Indian cities have only taken symbolic, half-hearted, measures in doing away with opacity in their functioning. Path-breaking initiatives taken by certain cities have remained isolated instances because of the absence of a countrywide sharing of best practices and lack of mandatory high standards. Nothing else can explain why Rajkot discloses its daily revenue collections up to 26 October but larger cities don’t even disclose their audited accounts on their websites; why only Gurgaon facilitates online filing of RTIs (including credit card payment facility for the fee) and why Coimbatore is among the few cities that let citizens write directly to their mayor and councillors through the website.

With wireless teledensity at 170% in our cities and Internet penetration expected to grow three fold in the next three years, this could be the age of digital renaissance for city governments in India. We simply need smarter cities.

Srikanth Viswanathan is manager, Public Record of Operations and Finance (PROOF), the public disclosure and accountability initiative of Janaagraha Centre for Citizenship and Democracy. Janaagraha is a not-for-profit organization focussed on transforming the quality of life in urban India.

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