Building ICT-based Information Flows to Improve Citizen-Government Engagement

Many public funded social welfare schemes in India suffer from implementation problems. Most of these problems can be traced to missing or broken information flows and accountability loops. First, beneficiaries are often not aware about the schemes and the rules and regulations governing the schemes and the policymakers does not have any direct medium to obtain feedback on the schemes from the beneficiaries. Second, they are not able to access scheme-related data owing to Internet access and literacy challenges because the data is often posted on webbased MIS systems. Third, when the entitlements are denied there is no effective avenue to redress their grievances as most grievances filed on the government-run helplines go unresolved or the resolutions are ineffective. In this thesis we address the questions of how to augment the grievance redressal systems to improve their uptake and effectiveness; how can low-literacy users access information on web-MIS platforms and report discrepancy in the data; and, how can policy-makers directly obtain feedback on the implementation of the schemes from the beneficiaries. We approach these questions by charting out the different stakeholders in public welfare schemes and public services, like the citizens, implementing officials, policy making officials and auditors. Information flows between these actors are either missing or broken. Flow of information from the government to the beneficiaries and from the beneficiaries to the government can establish feedback loops that make the system more accessible, transparent and accountable over time. Towards this end, we introduce new information flows into the system by designing, building and deploying several Information and Communication (ICT) tools. We designed a model of grievance redressal which connects citizens with volunteers from the civil society through an IVR (Interactive Voice Response) and Android based system. The civil society volunteers leverage their personal networks and influence to build pressure and push grievances for resolution. We built and deployed a system which crawls web-MIS platforms and through IVR calls communicates scheme-related data to the beneficiaries and enables them to flag anomalous data. We designed deployed IVR tools to collect unstructured and structured feedback from the users about the implementation of public schemes and systems. Through the deployment of the tools in the real world, we were able to establish new information loops among the stakeholders. With the help of a pool of civil society volunteers, who resolved several difficult grievances, we were able to establish a case for integrating the civil society into grievance redressal systems. When provided access to the information on web-MIS platforms, the beneficiaries were able to identify the information being shared, flag anomalous data published by the government and help identify places where the scheme was particularly performing poorly. We were also able to collect unstructured and structured feedback from the users about the implementation of the schemes which the policy makers acknowledged was new information for them and will help in improving the implementation of the schemes. The models and processes documented in this thesis are being used by the government and other agencies to improve access to services for citizens.