During my last visit to India, I participated in a few meetings on questions such as strengthening the right information act, the role of the PDS, and other social issues. In all these meetings there was a vigorous debate on how mobile phones could be used on each of these issues given the rapid spread of mobiles in rural India. Despite periodic discussion about the use of technology, I did not hear viable ideas among my activist friends. I believe that this is in part because most of them are not advanced users of technology, and they have definitely not indulged in creating any application based on mobile phones. Consequently, they do not have the technical imagination on what could be done and what the limitations of technology are, even when there is a feeling that technology could be put to good use for the causes that they pursue.

While that remains the case with seasoned activists, many new initiatives have come from those who are savvier with technology. These interesting initiatives including an online bulletin board that could be accessed via mobile phones, mobile phone interface between underserved groups and medical professionals, monitoring of elections, platforms for civic complaints, et cetera.

While the applications per se are simple, the process of creating and deploying these applications is made a lot more complex by the fact that they have to deal with telephone operators to get short codes and other infrastructure, negotiate better deals with these operators for getting good rates, get servers (the location of the servers is sensitive since calls/SMS I typically initiated from these locations, and thus they have implications for cost), and deal with a lot of other technical issues that are in some sense peripheral to the project.

In addition to these technical issues, there will now be legal issues including a recent law that permits a maximum of 100 SMSes per SIM card per day. Dealing with all these issues, along with the cost of commercial providers makes mobile based social projects a costly one to undertake, that can be demotivating for most people who wish to take it up.

Given the context where a number of activists are thinking about the use of mobile phones for social causes, and the context in which a number of young people are taking imaginative initiatives, it would be useful to have a foundation that could offer basic mobile-based services on the cloud for public services applications. Such a foundation could accelerate innovations in mobile based applications by reducing the costs of creating such systems.

I imagine that such a service will offer servers that could be used to send and receive SMS messages and voice messages, a set of phone numbers that could be used around India, built in modules for surveys, mass messaging and other common uses. Finally, it should also offer an API for those who wish to build applications based on their need. The foundation can also negotiate good rates with telephone companies and train users on the legal issues.

Services such as Twillio in the US offer many of these capacities on ready-made basis, and services such as SMS-Gupshup have started providing some of these in the Indian context. These are mainly commercial providers, and so they costs are substantial. Public service websites like Kiirti.org provide some services for free, but they do not offer a facility for others to create applications using the website. Google’s SMS channel is a good resource, but it does not allow for customized messages. Thanks to these limitations, there remains the need for a platform with broad based capabilities; I believe that it will go a long way in fostering innovation in using mobile phones for social causes.

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During the 1980s, Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS), an NGO working in rural Rajasthan in India began to campaign for access to government records related to wage employment programs for the rural poor. In the course of their work, MKSS discovered that accessing official records and information was critical to exposing corrupt practices by officials at a local level. This soon became the central strategy in their fight against acts of corruption. MKSS rallied the support of other NGOs in Rajasthan, and started protests to make access to official records a legal right. The success of this movement in Rajasthan encouraged organizations in other parts of India to join hands with MKSS in lobbying for a powerful right to information law for the whole of India, which was passed in 2005.

MKSS and other NGOs involved in India’s right to information movement realized that merely having access to government records was not enough given the sheer complexity of the records and peoples’ ability to understand them. Over the last 20 years, they have developed a system for collecting, processing, and verifying government records and information on the ground. This process, known as a social audit, has now become one of the most popular tools to combat corruption in India.

Social auditing evolved in a rural setting in response to corruption that happens on a regular basis at the village level. This form of corruption is often referred to as corruption in the “last mile,” and it manifests in forms such as siphoning of pensions from the elderly, appropriating the wages of daily labourers, or diverting subsidized food grains from beneficiaries. The social audit approach allows India’s poor to play an active role in reducing corruption in their communities.

Social audits are typically organized by NGOs that work closely with the community, though some state governments in India have institutionalized this method with official patronage. The process of an audit involves gathering official records about a particular government project or development work (for example, cash books, muster rolls, measurement books, supply lists) and verifying if the activities and projects on paper, actually exist in reality. For example, let’s say that a ration shop that distributes subsidized food grains has recorded that Ram came to the shop every month and received 10 KG of wheat each month for the last six months. A social audit cross verifies this information through a door-to-door survey, where Ram is asked if he actually received his entitlement. If the audit finds that Ram did not receive his fair share, the community has proof that the ration shop siphoned rations and thus the act of act of corruption is exposed. The power of this process is evident by the fact that even though very few convictions happen on the basis of the findings of a social audit, data shows that the levels of corruption have reduced appreciably in places where audits have been organized regularly. After the data has been compiled, a large public gathering is organised where the data and findings from the audit are presented to the public. Typically, government officials, administrators, and citizens are invited to participate in these gatherings. .

The fundamental method of a social audit seems rather simple at first glance: access the official record and cross verify it with the person receiving the services or goods, such as the case with Ram. But, when you dig more deeply into the actual details of how the process takes place, there are many complexities and challenges. For example, one needs a lot of experience and expertise in order to understand which records to access, and whether they are complete and accurate. Once official records are obtained, it takes considerable skill and time to process the records before the door-to-door survey for verification of records can take place. These and other complexities make a social audit a costly affair requiring considerable human resources, skills, time, and organizational effort. As a result, social auditing has not been adopted on a wide scale throughout India, despite its promise. My hope is that with the right technology, the process can become more streamlined and efficient, and thus adopted more broadly.

I am working on an initiative at Stanford University’s Program on Liberation Technology to explore ways that technology, and particularly mobile phones, can be used to combat corruption at the grassroots level, and enhance the existing social audit approach. Through basic mobile phone SMS technology, official records on basic individual entitlements such as pensions, subsidized food grain, and maternity entitlements could be delivered to individuals via monthly text messages. Individuals, such as Ram in the scenario mentioned above, would be able to compare the count provided in the text message with the amount of rice he actually received. This would help him identify if he received what is legally due to him, or if a part of his entitlement was swindled without his knowledge.

We hope that this knowledge in itself would empower people who have been victims of corruption and would enable them to use this information to approach various grievance redressal mechanisms that they have access to. This might involve approaching senior officials, confronting the corrupt, or even taking up protests against the corrupt. At a later stage of the project, it may be possible to add other features that will enable the victims of corruption to take action using mobile phones. For example, the SMS could include the phone number of responsible officials, or an NGO could collect the complaints and initiate action on their behalf. While possibilities abound, we believe that the best initiative will come from the people themselves.

The main benefit of using SMS technology is that it requires very limited skill, knowledge, or effort from the user. And, it eliminates costly, time-consuming in-person surveys and audits. By using this technology, official information can be disseminated on a regular basis, unlike in the current model where social audits are done sporadically.

Like any technology tool, this of course has its limitations. One of the critical functions of social auditing in India has been its role in mobilizing the general public. The process of gathering people together face-to-face in a public meeting creates a collective energy, which can motivate people to fight corruption. By digitizing this system, these public gatherings will no longer be needed. That said, we believe that mobile technology brings the ability to more widely and regularly expose corruption that directly affects individuals, and as a result, has the power to ultimately lead to even greater collective anger that is often a precursor to mobilization. Further, it arms individuals with precise information – something they never had before — that officials cannot argue or ignore.

The project has now received the commitment of officials in the states of Bihar and Andhra Pradesh in India and a team that we helped organize is just starting to build the basic technology to store and disseminate public records. We will start with select programs such as the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act in India and expand the coverage over the next few years. Once the technology is ready, it will be implemented for two years in randomly selected villages, so that we can test if it has an impact on corruption compared to other villages where the system has not been introduced

In the last 15 years, the number of countries with right to information laws has increased dramatically. Along with this, there is increasing digitization of public records, which will make this kind of exercise relatively cheap. This means that we now have the legal and technical infrastructure to enable millions, rather than a small number of well organized groups, to combat corruption.

I would like to thank Alma Freema’s support in editing the article.

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This is a response to a critique of wathiqah.com (a platform to discuss the future of Egypt’s constitution) in Meta-Activism Project. The article entitled “the revolution is not a branding opportunity” points out that the name of the commercial platform is visible prominently and takes an objection to it. She also discusses the limitations of such platforms to which I would like to respond.

The author points out that online discussions reach a very small proportion of the population, that they are not representative, and that they are easy to manipulate by well organised groups. I agree with the critique whole-heartedly, and I guess most people will do so as well. The question I wish to ask here is, given the problems, do such platforms have a democratic role at all?

If one were to examine any single dialogue process, I am sure we can find a thousand reasons to call it unrepresentative. Most active dialogues tend to involve small numbers of people. This can be said not just of a process, but also of any organisation, political party, social movement, or any forum. For that matter established electoral processes in the most advanced democracies too suffer from some of these limitations, in the strict sense of the word. For example, despite its formal representation of all US citizens, one could say that elected bodies could be hijacked by organized groups, and that the number of people who participate in electoral process is low, not to talk of effective participation.

To take a different example, social movements that have radically deepened democracy have been criticised for leaving out significant social groups. For example, the civil rights movement in the USA has been justly criticized for ignoring the voices of women; prominent women’s movements have been criticised for being unrepresentative of the voices of lower class women. The examples can go on and on.

My argument is that no single process, forum or organisation can perfectly satisfy all democratic principles. Democracy is an endless conversation that necessarily has to happen in multiple spaces. Wathiqah is one such forum that is mediating a few conversations. Its democratic role lies in the fact that it is engaging thousands of citizens in thinking about the constitution.

It enables a lot of individuals to voice their opinion about political issues. I believe that forming and articulating political positions is not an easy task, and that by making that process simple, the platform assists a lot of people to develop their political persona, which is critical for good citizenship.

Further, when a large group engages in a conversation, new ideas tend to emerge. The design of online discussion platforms help us identify some widely shared ideas. Such identification in itself is an important democratic act.

Enabling large numbers of people to engage with political issues, providing a space for people to voice their opinions, providing a forum for the exchange of ideas and the possibility of identifying a few widely shared ideas are the critical democratic functions that such a platform performs.

While these are democratic functions, we should acknowledge that online discussions are accessible only by a limited population, and that they remain vulnerable to hijacking by organized groups. Given these limitations, it would be a grievous mistake to interpret the “outcome” of the conversation as THE voice of a society.

If we understand the process with its limitations, and if online platforms are one among many other forums of conversation, then one could say that they serve an important democratic purpose. The critique at Meta Activism and others will ensure that we remember the partial nature of the conversation, and such reminders play an important democratic role as well. That said, we should not forget that partiality is the nature of any democratic conversation. Online platforms provide an avenue for large scale engagement and are especially good at reaching a lot of young people who are otherwise left out of political dialogue. I guess that is a goal that those of us committed to democracy can cherish.

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The level of corruption in the public distribution system has been one of the rallying points in the cry for change.  The following are some of the corruption related arguments for change:

There is large scale corruption in the system

It is undeniable that there is a lot of corruption in the PDS, and something needs to be done about it.  In arguing that we should shift from PDS to coupons or cash transfers, we have to ask if the chances of corruption will be lower in the proposed systems compared to what we have.  There is little evidence to make that argument.  India has a number of cash transfer programs such as old-age pensions, maternity benefits, family benefit, etc.  P. Chidambaram introduced a well-publicised coupon system in one of his budgets, and there are other benchmarks for the suggestions being made today.  If one wishes to do so seriously, they could examine the level of corruption in such programs and compare it with the PDS.

The proponents of PDS reform have not offered any evidence as to whether these alternatives work.  There are scattered references to a cash transfer program in Mexico, and in other parts of the world completely ignoring the reality at home.  I suspect that there are two reasons why we see no evidence that cash transfers work better: nobody has chosen to carefully evaluate the alternatives for the lack of interest in such an exercise, and in part because the unpublicized official evaluations of coupon experiments are not flattering making it difficult for proponents to use them for their purposes.  The proposed reform is thus not evidence-based in the Indian context; it is a purely ideological project based on the mainstream economics today.

The fact that the proposed reform is mainly an ideological project should not deter us from the possible merits of the reform proposals.  If a well considered idea has a promise, it is well worth giving a shot.  Is the reform proposal a well-considered idea?

Corruption is entrenched in the PDS

One serious argument is that moving to channels that we know to be less corrupt than the PDS could be a strategic way of reducing corruption.  This is certainly a serious argument to consider, especially given the deeply entrenched culture of corruption in the PDS.  While I do believe that corruption is deeply entrenched in the PDS, I do not believe that the system is irredeemably lost.  Many State governments have demonstrated that they could make the system work if it becomes a political priority, Chhattisgarh being an important example.  Beyond the PDS, one can take the example of Bihar that was considered a hopeless government, but a determined CM has shown how things can turn around dramatically with some political will.  Where the political incentive is to make money off such programs, the odds are that a proposed alternative would suffer equally.

Proponents have also argued that the banking system is less corrupt, and so using that channel would help in reducing corruption.  It may well work in areas where there is a good banking network.  It would be a move worth considering in urban areas, but then the use of banks does not eliminate every scope for corruption.  Ghost beneficiaries could continue to exist, those who issue periodic identification documents to beneficiaries could charge them, shortages in overall allocation could be created (as it gets created in PDS), which could then be used for arbitrage.  Other possibilities abound.

It does not work since the subsidy is not given directly

One curious argument that found its way to the economic survey 2009-10, and has been repeated by some prominent economists is that the PDS does not work since the subsidy is not given directly to the citizen, but is instead routed through intermediaries.  The idea that cash transfers or coupons will eliminate intermediaries is silly.  We don’t expect beneficiaries to have the direct access to the coffers of the Ministry of Rural Development from where beneficiaries will directly take their allocation of cash without the interference of any official whatsoever.  Cash transfer will have its own set of intermediaries.

If intermediaries are the problem, then replacing the PDS with coupons is the silliest idea possible.  First of all, there will have to be a system of distributing the coupons periodically to the beneficiaries.  This will necessarily involve multiple layers of the government.  Beneficiaries will then have to collect their entitlements from a grocery store or other shops, which are nothing but intermediaries.  Private shopkeepers will not have the same kind of accounting formalities, or any other measure of accountability that ration shop dealer will have to maintain.  In essence, the grocery store is an intermediary with little accountability.  The grocery store owner will in turn have to submit the coupons to a government agency which will reimburse her.  This additional channel will create its own set of opportunities for corruption.  In all, the coupon system only represents more intermediaries and less accountability.

The system is too large to monitor

There have been reports in the media that the Chief Minister of Delhi, Ms. Shiela Dixit, advocated cash transfers since the PDS is too large to be monitored effectively.  This is curious in a lot of ways.  Delhi is one of the smaller states, and the size argument should be the least problem there.  It should be even less of a problem compared to other states, considering the fact that the state has fantastic transport and communication infrastructure that makes monitoring easier.  Curiously, the argument of size has not been offered on Public Works Department or other departments that are much larger in the state.  Will we even consider eliminating them?  Delhi also has a well established right to information movement that has focussed on the PDS from the beginning that would assist a well-meaning Chief Minister in the quest to monitor.

Delhi’s RTI activists have met the Chief Minister time and again with well-documented information about corruption in specific ration shops, only to find the CM stonewalling.  If monitoring is THE problem, we would expect the Chief Minister to act on the information she was given.  Alas, that is not the problem.  How do we know that cash transfers will work better in her government? Do we know that existing cash transfers in Delhi work a lot better?  Sheila Dixit has been a wonderful Chief Minister for Delhi in many ways, but in this case her arguments cannot be less convincing.

The promise of right to information

Given that the PDS involves straightforward entitlements to specified beneficiaries, the right to information movement offers a terrific tool to contain corruption in the system.  Using the right to information, it is possible to identify precisely whether there is corruption in the system, who is corrupt and by what magnitude.  There is much that could be done to strengthen the RTI regime including proactive provision of information via notice boards, the Internet, mobile phones and other means.  If control of corruption is a goal, then we have to focus on means that we know to work, and means that have a promise instead of focusing our attentions on ideological projects with no demonstrated or theoretical reasons for the alternatives to work better.

The bottom line is that there is no doubt that there is a lot of corruption in the PDS and that something has to be done about it, and there is scant reason to believe that the proposal to change to coupons or cash transfers will reduce the level of corruption.  The government of Chhattisgarh offers to send a text message to anyone who wishes to monitor ration shop, whenever grains are delivered to such shops.  In addition, they have introduced stricter norms of documentation including the requirement that delivery trucks have to take a picture of the truck in front of the ration shop and send an MMS to the State government.  Such measures, along with the fact that the State government has responded more actively to complaints about the PDS have contributed to a major improvement in the system.  The power of right information can be extended even further using digital technologies more effectively.

A lot could be done to redress grievances about the PDS, which will automatically have an impact on how the system functions.  For example, setting up independent ombudsman, imposing penalties to officials who do not comply with PDS regulations, initiating independent call centres that could receive and officially lodge complaints, training the judiciary to respond to at least large-scale complains on the PDS, et cetera could be done.

Those calling for reforms have paid scant attention to other alternatives for better accountability.  It is particularly surprising when Chief Ministers and other powerful officials call for the reform, especially when we know that they could do a lot to change how the system works without radically reforming the system, if only it were their priority.

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“Do you want to wear an anklet or do you want to go to prison?” said a US consular officer in Hyderabad about the tagging of some Indian students in the United States to monitor their movements. These anklets contain a GPS device that closely monitors the movements of the students, and will alert officials in case they move beyond areas that they have been authorised to. The anklets provide a useful analogy to the Unique ID (UID) project by the government of India. Let me explain.

In an article entitled Prison without walls, Graeme Wood argues that such radio tags were originally created by BI (the market leader in such tracking systems) for cows. Radio tags containing a unique ID would be attached to one cow each. When a cow goes to the feeding station, the station would provide the cow with its ration by recognising the ID. Subsequently, if the cow comes back for a second helping, the unique ID would help the feeding station recognise that the cow has already had its share, and will not serve it any additional helping.

The system was later extended to people. For example, such a device (often in the form of anklets) would be attached to someone under house arrest. The radio tag will be monitored constantly by a sensor at the house, and if the person leaves the house, it would immediately intimate the police about it. This system was later extended in powerful ways by adding a GPS device to the radio tag.

The GPS device allows authorities to provide additional kinds of restrictions and freedoms. For example, a person under house arrest could be monitored, and it also allows other kinds of geographical restrictions on a person. For example, sex offenders are prohibited from going near schools and other areas that have a lot of children. Alcohol related offenders can be asked to stay away from bars, and a police officer will be intimated if such a person stays close to a bar for more than 60 seconds. It can also be used to monitor if the person attends a meeting of alcoholics anonymous, as they have been mandated to, by monitoring if the person is present at a given location on the given time and date.

Norms, freedoms, influences

The system could be understood by focussing on three key components. First of all, there are a set of norms that detail what the subject should and should not do. In the case of cows, the norm is one ration per segment of the day. For someone under house arrest, she is expected to stay within the geographical boundary of the house. For those who have committed sex/alcohol related offences, they are expected to stay away from certain areas.

Secondly, these norms circumscribe the freedoms of the subject. They selectively allow certain cows, certain students, certain people (the sex offenders), and others to do certain things and they prohibit them from doing certain things. They thus determine what kind of freedoms the subjects enjoy.

Thirdly, the anklets and other such IT devices give those in possession of power tremendous influence over the subjects. They do so by helping those in positions of power to establish the identity of the person. This identity helps the influential to closely monitor the actions of the subjects, and this in turn enables them to carefully permit or deny various actions of the subjects. This is often achieved by the threat of a greater punishment if the subject violates the norm that they are supposed to adhere to.

The UID Project

Different IT devices would be required to monitor different kinds of actions. For example, a GPS device would be able to establish if a person is in a bar, but cannot detect it if a person is having alcohol at home. There are other devices that can monitor alcohol content in the body by measuring the nature of sweating in a person’s body. They too have been used in the United States. The UID project by the government of India belongs to a class of such IT projects that can help those in positions of power to identify, monitor and regulate the freedoms of those within the Indian Territory, and Indian citizens abroad.

For example, the government has announced that it will use UID in the Public Distribution System to provide rations to people. They argue that the UID card will prevent people from overdrawing the rations, especially in the names of those who are either not authorized or those who do not even exist in reality. The home ministry is reportedly building the National Intelligence Grid (NATGRID) that will use the UID to closely monitor where we travel (based on our ticket purchases), who we talk to (using mobile phone data), and an assortment of other things. Such close monitoring will provide the government, especially the security agencies a degree of influence over people: from terrorists to those who oppose corruption vigorously.

By associating such devices with cows and prisons, I may have given a sinister tone to such devices. I should clarify that I’m not entirely against the use of such devices. They are the tools, and their merits should be understood by how they are used, and how they could be used. I will take that up in a subsequent article.

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In 2004 website called yelp.com was created to help people find local businesses such as small restaurants, salons, etc. The idea of the website was simple. Any user or a business can locate itself on the map and provide basic information about itself. For example, a restaurant could describe itself and provide its menu and other details, and any user could review the organisation. Someone who is looking for a service, e.g. salon in a particular area, can now search easily for all salons by the price, services and reviews.

What yelp does is to enable people anyone to find information about services, and at the same time to offer information about it in form of reviews. With millions of users contributing a little bit of information each, the overall knowledge base becomes tremendous. The idea of yelp could be extended in powerful ways to deal with public services and public assets.

Making information easy to access

Every Panchayat in Tamil Nadu is expected to maintain a register with all the public assets in the Panchayat. This particular Panchayat was supposed to have six ponds, but then two of the ponds were “missing”, naturally, under the houses of some influential people. If we go through other such registers in other such offices, we will be sure to discover missing houses, dams, ration shops, roads and many other public facilities.

Most of us do not have an access to these registers to find out what assets and services exist officially. The access will be even more curtailed for those who are seeking to establish corruption. While the right information laws do provide us with legal access to such information, laying our hands on it takes much effort. This naturally deters public involvement in dealing with corruption.

Imagine now the ability even for an amateur to lay hands on such information with little effort. For example, we can create an application that will list all the public assets within the 2 km area of where one is standing using a mobile phone. This can radically change our ability to monitor the government, and the ability to watch comes with the ability to transform. Such applications can put pressure on the government, and force it to perform better.

Providing feedback

While discovery is one aspect of and yelp, feedback is the other. Let’s take NREGA as an example. We can easily develop an application that allows anyone to provide feedback on each project and to rate them. This will help us create a large database of information about the quality of works that can transform the way we discuss programmes like the NREGA. Having concrete information will put pressure on corruption and poor quality, and will also help us to discover where things work. This will help us learn effective methods, and perhaps create rewards for those who make them work.

Campaign tool

Having a tool like this can also enable campaigns in interesting ways. It should not be difficult for activists working on PDS, or even the media to start a campaign for people to evaluate the functioning of ration shops. In a very short time, we could have a large volume of information that can then serve as the basis of an informed campaign. Similarly a campaign to evaluate the usage of MP or MLA funds could also have interesting democratic implications during an election. We can go on and on with other examples.

Getting there

Interestingly, a lot of information about public services and assets is already available online. For example, basic information about school infrastructure of almost every school is available in one place. In states like Andhra Pradesh, we can identify every project in every village with information on everyone who received any money for working in NREGA. There are many other such examples, and the availability of information online is increasing exponentially.

While information is expanding rapidly, the format of presentation leaves much to be desired. India’s budget documents continue to be presented in hundreds of PDF tables. God knows what one is supposed to do with that. School information systems or NREGA information do not come with adequate geospatial data. There is also no way of developing applications for people to provide feedback on these projects. But these issues can be addressed with a little bit more work, now that the real hard work of collecting the basic databases and putting them online has been done.

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“To be ruled is to be kept an eye on, inspected, spied on, regulated, indoctrinated, sermonized, listed and checked off, estimated, appraised, censured, ordered about…to be ruled is at every operation, transaction, movement, to be noted, registered, counted, priced, admonished, prevented, reformed, redressed, corrected”. Proudhon quoted by James Scott in Seeing like a state.

The power of information is often used by those in powerful positions to control others.  The right to information movement inverts this principle and turns the gaze on those in positions of power by making their actions visible and thus amenable to democratic control.  Sharing information is often tantamount to giving up power.  One corrupt official jokingly told me that he would rather part with his life than part with his papers. And there are others who would rather part with your life than their papers.  Right to information activists have been threatened, beaten and even murdered in the quest to get information that is legally theirs.

Such struggle on the part of the activists and common people to find information naturally puts a dampener on their efforts, and allows corruption to flourish.  Such struggles are caused by the fact that we have to access paper based records precisely from those who are corrupt, and thus would resist parting with the papers.  Technology can remove the control of information from the hands of those who indulge in corruption and put them in the public domain, and thus have major consequences for accountability.

Automating payments, recording transactions through the use of smart cards, and other measures can take information out of the control of those working in the grassroots and make it difficult for them to resist providing information or doing damage control with records when they sense trouble.  It will thus make it safer, quicker and easier for activists to gain information, which is half the battle won.

The other half, which involves taking action on the information, is equally dangerous and costly terrain and thus the use of technology is not an automatic solution to demands of accountability.  Further, centralization of records can create new possibilities for “entrepreneurs”. But then, careful use of technology for rights can win us half the battle, and it is worth investing our efforts in designing it.

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In an earlier post I asked if there are technological answers to the problem of accountability, or if accountability is purely a political problem needing political solutions.  I then argued that while accountability is best seen as a political issue, technology can have an impact on the political terrain, and thus have an impact on accountability.  Let me illustrate this an example.

Micro-politics of accountability

At the heart of accountability in government programmes lies the process of specifying a set of responsibilities, clearly recording activities of various agents, cross verifying this information and holding agents accountable if there are breaches in performance. Let me illustrate this using the example of “ration dealers” who are the retail agents that distribute subsidized grains eligible beneficiaries in India.

Every ration dealer is expected to record each transaction in a register that she maintains and in the ration card that is maintained by the beneficiary. Monitoring agencies can check the register and see if such families actually exist in the village.  They can cross-verify the records with the ration dealer and the beneficiary to see if they got the entitlements they received on paper; of course, the record with the dealer can also be cross-checked with the oral account of the beneficiaries, though this would have a little less validity. Similarly, we can also add up the amount of grains distributed and verify if all the grains provided were distributed.  These are a few among many ways of cross-checking to establish if the ration dealer acted according to the prescribed norms.

Recording & accounting

Without proper records, ability to cross verify or follow up on problems when found, accountability cannot be secured in a corrupt environment.  If it is well-designed, technology can assist in each of these processes.  First of all, use of smart cards and other systems can help us record every transaction including the time, place, quantity and price accurately. In this process the use of smart cards can reduce problems like fake signatures and entitlements of people who have the card in their possession cannot be transferred without accessing their card. The impact can be significant.

The use of technology also allows us to record new forms of information such as photos, videos, geo-location of activities, biometric information, etc.  Off-late, technologies that could record such information have become cheap; to take an example, an i-phone could record all these forms of information with ease.  The use of such devices allows us to account for the activities of officials at a much greater detail, and thus help us establish if they performed their duties.  For example, photo and video based evidence of public works can provide reasonably good evidence of whether work happened in the project on a said date.  Entries on registers can be more easily faked.

Cross-verification

The next step in establishing accountability is cross-verification of the the information in registers.  The greatest promise of technology comes at this level. To begin with, it is extremely time consuming to process paper data to even start the verification process. In an employment scheme like NREGA cross verification involves meeting a beneficiary and finding out how many days she worked in a particular project and how much money they received.  This is then followed by door-to-door verification with each person to see if they got the money that they were officially supposed to receive.

Suppose we are hoping to verify a project in which 100 people of a village worked in a project that lasted 25 days in all. Not everyone works every day, and suppose 75 people turned up on an average day. There will be 1875 rows of information for the project (75 people each day for 25 days) and in order to find out how many days John worked, we have to go through 1875 rows manually and calculate the total days of work he did. The same has to be repeated for each person; that is going through 187,500 rows of information again and again.  If we process one record at 10 seconds on an average, it would take 520 hours to just prepare the documents for verification.  With digital entries at source, this cumbersome task can be done in one click.  Similarly, instead of making extensive trips and applications for securing documents, individuals can find the same online or on their phones quickly and easily.

This team worked for three days to compile information before a social audit of NREGA projects in 25 Panchayats of Villupuram.

Technology can thus reduce the costs of cross-verification dramatically and thus alter the terrain of politics for accountability. But for this to happen, information should be easily, quickly and cheaply accessible for those who wish to take up this exercise.

There is an impressive movement in India today to combat corruption using right to information. Ready availability of information can give a fillip to these movements. If a social audit team can just go online and get a ready list of how many days each family in a village got work in an NREGA project or how much rice a family received each month for the last six months, it would be far easier for them to carry out the verification exercise.

If technology has to have a significant impact, suitable systems have to be developed. Today, anyone can go online and find out who worked for how many days in NREGA in any village. Such facilities should be available on all entitlements in the fullest spirit of right to information. In the last 10 years, the penetration of mobile phones and public call offices have increased so much that access to telephones has increased dramatically even in far-flung areas. Instead of stopping with providing information online, we could think about finding information through mobile phones either in form of text messaging, phone browsing or through call centres. Similarly, people should also be able to get information by sending a letter requesting information.

Such measures will make the right to information more meaningful and less costly, and will thus increase public vigilance dramatically. Public vigilance, rather than internal monitoring systems, will force the government to take action when irregularities are found.  Ultimately all the available information cannot make a dent if people are not vigilant and active. Today there is an active right to information movement in India. The time I spent in rural Tamil Nadu and other states also gives me a feeling that there are enough people who will act, if they have the right tools at their command. Technology can energize the sense of public vigilance by providing low cost access to information and in doing that permanently alter the terrain of politics of accountability.

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The Government of India (GoI) has an informative website with all budget speeches and the complete set of budget proposals. Consider these simple questions:

1. Which department got the highest outlay?
2. What has happened to expenditure on child-related schemes over the last 10 years?
3. Which states are getting money for laying roads?
4. Which states have not used allotted money for primary education?
5. Do reserved constituencies get less allocation?

These are reasonable questions people would want to ask of the budget. The information needed to answer the first two is there, but it would require us to open dozens of PDF files and compute digitised information manually! The first question is rather simple, but to answer this I have to manually add plan and non-plan outlay for each department and then find out which department got the largest allocations. This is because all information is presented in PDF files that are good only for printing.

Providing it in a ‘machine readable format’ would enable us to answer many questions with ease that we cannot do with PDF.

Bane of aggregate information

Budgets are made by adding up demands from each state, but only totals are available for our use. Thanks to this, a simple question like how much money has each state got for laying roads or to start child-care centres becomes unanswerable. If the entire budget process is digitised from source systematically, we can get primary data with which answering such questions will become possible. It will also make it easier for the officials who work on this process.

Basic databases

A Dalit politician told me recently that reserved constituencies get lower budgetary allocations. This is a serious question that should examined, but practically cannot be done with budget information. When the finance minister tells us how much money was used last year by each department, it is based on information that was recorded for every rupee spent by each department in each village. Today every village does its accounts and these are replicated by the district, and by states and then the centre. Such duplication can be avoided by digitising at source and developing a system for sharing that information upwards.

Suppose we can get village-wise expenditure, even then we cannot find if reserved constituencies spent less money. If we have another database that says which villages belong to reserved constituencies, this task will become simple. Similarly having geographic databases can help us see this information on a map to see regional variations. No database including a detailed budget can help us answer all important questions. The ability to combine information from other databases can be critical to answer important questions, and such analysis can be insightful and useful in democratic engagement. In order to do so, there should be a commitment to digitise census, maps, and other basic information and make them available freely for public use.

Accessibility

One of the 8 principles deals with information being accessible for the widest range of purposes. Suppose there is an active people’s organisation in a district that wishes to track all policy issues relating to the district. By designing all government data in accessible formats such as XML, the group can easily combine information from many sources in a convenient format. For example, it can create a report that combines what questions their MLAs and MPs asked in assembly and parliament, news reports about the district, how many people got employment in NREGA in the last quarter, which funds were not used by the administration, etc. Given the explosion of online information, a lot of information to answer these questions is available online. But thanks to poor formatting of information, such reports will have to be done manually.

Government of India’s budget website is the good example of an important and informative website that is nearly useless thanks to the poor formatting of information. Making the same information available in machine readable formats will take us a long way. The real revolution lies in creating systems to make budget to the last detail available to any user.

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I argued in a recent post that digital technologies can add power to the right to information movement by making information easily, quickly and cheaply accessible.  But for online data to be effective, government websites have to be suitably designed.  Here are some thoughts on this question:

The 8 principles

A good starting point is a set of far-reaching principles developed in meeting held at California:

Complete: All public data are made available. Public data are data that are not subject to valid privacy, security or privilege limitations.

Primary: Data are collected at the source, with the finest possible level of granularity, not in aggregate or modified forms.

Timely: Data are made available as quickly as necessary to preserve the value of the data.

Accessible: Data are available to the widest range of users for the widest range of purposes.

Machine processable: Data are reasonably structured to allow automated processing.

Non-discriminatory: Data are available to anyone, with no requirement of registration.

Non-proprietary: Data are available in a format over which no entity has exclusive control.

License-free: Data are not subject to any copyright, patent, trademark or trade secret regulation. Reasonable privacy, security and privilege restrictions may be allowed.

Beyond 8 Principles

These principles can have radical implications for how we use governmental data in India.  But to make websites an effective tool for right to information, we have to supplement these with a few other principles:

Authenticity: Information should be automatically certified like any document made available through a formal request, so government is legally accountable to stand by information provided.

Digitising at source: Some reasonably well designed websites contain little or no information in them since a lot information is not digitised.  Digitising information at source and integrating it systematically will avoid duplication and ensure completeness of information.  This needs reliable systems, infrastructure at the grassroots and a suitable legal framework.

Efficient data systems: Information should not be duplicated, and should be gathered at source in a convenient format.

Digitising all basic information: Maps, census data, village infrastructure, etc. are used in a lot of analysis.  Making this information available will increase the ways in which we can use such data dramatically.

I will illustrate the implications of these principles with concrete examples in a series of posts shortly.  Watch this space.

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