Indian Urban Transformation Index (UTI)
India Urban Transformation Index (IUTI) is an index that measures laws, policies, institutions and processes of urban local governments across 10 cities in India and 2 international peers (New York City & London). It is a measure of the systemic readiness to provide good urban governance.
IUTI has around 100 questions and is based on Janaagraha’s theory of change. These 100 questions are spread across 4 categories – Improved Urban Planning Design, Urban Capacities and Resources, Empowered and Legitimate Representatives and Transparency Accountability and Participation.
Current Phase of the Index
We have been working on the index for over a year and the research and scoring of the index has been completed. We are right now in the midst of preparing for the IUTI Awards ceremony to be held in the last week of March. We intend to release a report based on the findings of the research and also include a list of recommendations for improving urban governance in India.
Volunteering opportunities in Indian Urban Transformation Index (UTI)
Responsibilities
Requirement
Role – 2
Roles and Responsibilities include:
Start date: Immediate
Period of internship: 2 Months full/part time; Preferably a person who has a flair for event management.
Role – 3
Internship – Participatory Budgeting
PROOF - Public Records of Operations and Finance
PROOF is the public disclosure and accountability initiative of Janaagraha Centre for Citizenship and Democracy. PROOF seeks a proactive intern who will help build a community relationship protocol for its participatory budgeting exercise.
Roles and Responsibilities include:
Start date: Immediate
Preferred period of internship: Two months (minimum) + ; Preferably a final year undergrad student or a postgrad student.
Ward Quality Score
Ward Quality Score is the follow-up project to Janaagraha Centre for Citizenship and Democracy’s 2010 Ward Infrastructure and Services Assessment (WISA). Ward Quality Score aims to deliver an objective measure of the quality of life experienced by citizens in each of Bangalore’s 198 wards. To this end surveys are being done across five major categories – these categories having been defined as key determinants of urban quality of life. These categories are:
Mobility – including pedestrian traffic, public transport and private vehicles
Sanitation – involving solid waste management, sewerage, storm water drainage
Water – coverage, continuity, quantity and quality
Public amenities – parks and playgrounds
Environment – air, water, noise, and green cover
The data collected in these surveys will be scored against benchmarks from a scale of 0 to 10, with 0 being completely unacceptable and 10 hitting the established benchmarks. This scoring makes it easy to see at a glance the quality of any given ward’s infrastructure and delivery of services. The aim of this exercise is to empower citizens to drive the demand for better infrastructure and services in their city. By making the data readily available, it gives citizens the invaluable tool of irrefutable proof to drive the push for change. Janaagraha is seeking to make Ward Quality Score a feature of our umbrella project IChangeMyCity.
Roles and Responsibility include:
iChangeMyCity is a website for people who wish to improve the quality of life in their neighbourhoods, and are willing to participate in the process of change.
While cities are developed on different models, every city has a few integral parameters that need to be considered while defining the quality of life experienced by its citizens. Planning, Governance, Economy, Mobility, Safety, Water, Sanitation, Health, Education, Environment, Heritage, Art and Culture -- each of these play an important part in determining the quality of life in a city.
If we dig deep, every one of us has an issue that touches a raw nerve – be it tree cutting, solid waste management, traffic, water, urban poverty… so wouldn’t it be amazing to be able to come together to actually talk, share information, think and DO ourselves what needs to be done to solve the issues that plague our neighbourhoods, and the city at large? Wouldn’t each of us want to be just a little bit instrumental in building that change we want to see?
The iChangeMyCity website enables you to initiate this process of change by
Volunteering opportunities in IChangeMyCity
iChangeMyCity wants enthusiastic and committed volunteers who believe that the Internet can help to bring about social change. iJanaagraha is a website for people who wish to improve the quality of life in their neighbourhoods, and are willing to participate in the process of change.
About You:
Roles and Responsibilities include:
Skills Required:
Logistics: This role may require a certain amount of travel within the city.
How to begin networking on iChangeMyCity?
iChangeMyCity encourages citizens to sign up on the site, and participate in the activity of posting issues that plague their streets/wards/neighbourhoods by entering their location details. This way, citizens of the same street/ward can connect with one another, get together, and with the help of the civic know-how provided on the site, collectively solve the issues in their areas.
Roles and Responsibilities
Sign up users (with their profile details), street/ward/location details, and get them to post complaints in the following categories, on iJanaagraha staging url.
- Sign up at least 75 to 100 users (geographically distributed across the city) on the site with their location details and get them to post entries of issues under the iJanaagraha sub-categories.
- Each sub-category should have 5 entries under it.
Logistics:
This role will require a certain amount of travel within the city in order to reach out to people.
Bala Janaagraha’s curriculum – the “Me and My City” module – is civics in practice. Through interactive classroom sessions and project work, Bala Janaagraha aims to:
Volunteering Opportunities in Bala Janaagraha
Bala Janaagraha Facilitator
Janaagraha wants enthusiastic and committed volunteers who enjoy working with children. Bala Janaagraha is a uniquely designed citizenship education programme that is aimed at empowering children with the knowledge, skills and values necessary to develop a deep sense of ownership and responsibility towards their society.
About You:
Roles and Responsibilities include:
Skills Required:
Logistics: This role requires a fair amount of travel to the schools in the city
Advocacy
Janaagraha’s model of change leverages Advocacy as a medium to bring about long-term sustainable change. Janaagraha firmly believes that it is imperative to change policies and legislations in order to bring about lasting changes in urban governance. The Advocacy program involves extensive background research, preparing case studies, facilitating policy discussions and seminars, and advocating the REED reform framework at local, state and national levels.
The team operates four projects parallel –an Urban Governance Index, the Community Participation Laws project as well as our core legal functions.
a) Urban Governance IndexJanaagraha’s Urban Governance Index has been developed as a measurement of the governance systems tasked with responding to this ‘urban crisis’. Focusing on the governance system, or framework, “will not only assist in a detailed ‘Urban Governance Diagnostic’ of what ails a city and the region, but also provides coherence to the set of solutions that emerges.” The urban governance challenge Indian cities face, ‘is to design institutions that can deal with all of complex issues yet be close enough to the citizen to provide local public goods
b) Community Participation LawCommunity Participation Law is an effort towards institutionalising citizens’ participation in urban areas in India. It envisages two structures below the Urban Local Bodies – the ward committee and the area sabha, the area sabha being the closest to the citizens.
The essence of the Community Participation Law is to institutionalise citizen participation in urban governance, to provide a formal platform for the citizens to participate, plan, prioritise and decide for themselves on what they need from the urban local body, which operates on their money – in other words, to decide how their money should be spent by their local government, keep a watch on the development works and prevent corruption. In the ‘area’ or the ward or the city, people shall have their say in the planning directly. While this will help deepen democracy, it will also help in improving urban governance and service delivery. The quality of decisions made will be much better as these decisions would be rooted on knowledge of local realities and requirements. Citizens will be able to influence how information is shared, policies are formulated and implemented.
c) Janaagraha’s core legal functions
PROOF - Public Records of Operations and Finance
PROOF is the public disclosure and accountability initiative of Janaagraha Centre for Citizenship and Democracy.
Volunteering opportunities in Advocacy / PROOF
Janaagraha’s model of change leverages Advocacy as a medium to bring about long-term sustainable change. Janaagraha firmly believes that it is imperative to change policies and legislations in order to bring about lasting changes in urban governance. The Advocacy program involves extensive background research, preparing case studies, facilitating policy discussions and seminars, and advocating the systems reform framework at local, state and national levels. The Ward Quality Score is a co-owned project by the PROOF, Applied Research and Urban Capacity Building teams in the Advocacy cluster.
Ward Quality Score (WQS)
WQS is a quantitative measure of quality of infrastructure and services in a ward, where a ward is a unit of a city for which a representative is elected to the city council. It comprises 33 indicators spread across 5 categories.
Below are the components of WISA

ROLE-1
Responsibilities Include:
Qualifications/Skills:
Start Date – as soon as possible
Duration- at least a month
What’s in it for you:
ROLE-2
Responsibilities Include:
Qualifications/Skills:
Start Date – 10th-15th February, 2012
Duration- at least a month
What’s in it for you:
PROOF seeks to build a comprehensive website focussed on municipal finance, making it the first such website in India.
Roles and Responsibilities include:
PROOF Accountability and Disclosure Index
A pioneering metric to measure the nature and extent of accountability and disclosure practices in city governments.
Roles and Responsibilities include:
National Performance Reporting Framework for Urban Service Providers
An endeavour to standardise financial and performance reporting formats of city governments across India.
Roles and Responsibilities include:
A citizen centric Awards program which seeks to evaluate, rank and award websites of urban local bodies in India and benchmark them against global peers.
Roles and Responsibilities include:
Citizen outreach sessions on city budgets
Citizen outreach sessions with both lay citizens and domain professionals to catalyse interest among citizens on city budgets, create awareness of its impact on their lives and eventually evolve a workable participatory budgeting model.
Roles and Responsibilities include:
Urban Governance Index is Janaagraha’s endeavour to construct a benchmark index on Urban Governance in India that would evaluate cities across parameters that define urban governance.
Roles and Responsibilities include:
Improving quality-of-life in urban areas is the vision that drives Janaagraha. Good urban governance; effective urban management; and active citizenship are the key outcomes that Janaagraha seeks to promote.
Janaagraha’s Urban Capacity Building Programme (UCBP), therefore, works toward designing; developing; illustrating; facilitating; and, thereby, establishing apt learning events for champions and change-agents from all walks of life – who can positively influence broad-based and sustainable urban development.
Current volunteering opportunities in UCB
UCB, Support Executive
Roles and Responsibilities include:
Skills Required:
Those who have and can convey / demonstrate to us the:
Planning and Development (P&D) is a strategic initiative programme that supports the core programmes of Janaagraha. The P&D team has two mandates – strategic planning and development. The programme is mandated with providing ongoing support in the sustainability and scalability of all programme initiatives – pilot projects, advocacy and policy by adopting a specific fund-raising strategy. In addition, the programme also implements and undertakes those activities responsible for the branding of Janaagraha. These include a wide gamut ranging from the publication of performance reports to the implementation of processes necessary to ensure the smooth functioning of the organization.
Volunteering opportunities in Planning and Development
Roles and Responsibilities include:
Skills Required:
What’s in it for you
The communications team at Janaagraha handles internal and external communication. All programmes at Janaagraha are represented by this program and it is critical for us to have people with an eye for design and who pay attention to detail.
Volunteering opportunities in Communications
Janaagraha wants enthusiastic and committed volunteers who enjoy using graphics for communication and are committed to brilliance in design. The Communication team at Janaagraha is all about presenting the brand in an interesting and unique manner. So be it event collateral or a website, design plays an integral role in bringing a better understanding of what Janaagraha stands for.
About You:
Roles and Responsibilities include:
Skills Required:
Human Resource & Volunteer Management - HRVM
Volunteering is one of Janaagraha’s core values and our work is supported by a constant stream of volunteers and interns. We continually look to improve our internal systems to ensure a mutually productive volunteer experience.
Volunteering opportunities in HRVM
Developer
To support in the development of internal systems on volunteer management
About You:
Roles and Responsibilities include:
IUSF is a sister-organisation of Janaagraha, India’s leading NGO working on issues related to urban governance, citizen participation and democracy. Urban problems are far more complex than what they seem, and therefore need ‘systemic’ responses and not just ‘band-aid’ solutions. India Urban Space seeks to bring in a spatial focus not just into planning, but also into issues related to environment, infrastructure creation, service provision, poverty alleviation and urban governance. India Urban Space has grown from a platform that just advocates this view, to one that actively practices this view through pilot projects, and facilitates larger interfaces and partnerships amongst wider set of stakeholders that includes market players.
Volunteering opportunities in IUSP
IUSF wants enthusiastic and committed volunteers who believe that the Dynamic (Spatial) Plans shape vibrant cities. IUSF is an organization for enthusiastic planners who wish to improve the quality of life of their cities and neighbourhoods, and are willing to participate in the process of change.
About you:
Roles and Responsibilities include:
India Urban Space foundation is looking for a volunteer to join its team. India Urban Space foundation is Janaagraha’s partner program which aims to improve the quality of spatial planning and land management practices in urban India. We're a non-partisan, non-profit organization based in Bangalore that focuses on improving the ‘Quality of Life’ in Indian cities.
About You:
Roles and Responsibilities include:
Skills Required
Logistics: This role requires some amount of travel in the city.
Solid Waste Management - Research
The project for generating a System Dynamics (SD) model in Solid Waste Management is a part of a larger study to quantify the various metrics governing the quality of life (QoL) in urban areas. Managing solid waste is one of the most pernicious problems faced by urban areas today, and its effect permeates into areas such as health, human rights, child labour, economy of the country etc. Once the model is made, it will facilitate the engagement of concerned citizens and local bodies with the municipal government to identify better ways of dealing with civic problems that affect the QoL of citizens. The model will serve as a platform for simulating conditions to optimize the QoL by tweaking various parameters of urban life. We are working on this project in association with IIT Kharagpur and Yale University. In trying to create a mathematical model to simulate the QoL indicators, the first priority is to get dependable data to map to the SD model. This is the second phase of the project and the phase where we need volunteer support. Volunteers can help us in the data collection in the following role:
Volunteering Opportunities in Solid Waste Management
Roles and responsibilities include:
Skills required:
Jaagte Raho! & Community Policing
Jaagte Raho!
Jaagte Raho! Campaign, has been involved in advocacy efforts with the Election Commission of India (ECI) to reform the electoral systems in our country. The Bengaluru Electoral Systems Transformation (BEST) project is a consequence of the Memorandum of Understanding signed between the Election Commission of India (ECI) and Janaagraha
Community Policing
Janaagraha’s model of change leverages the usage of data-driven models as a medium to bring long-term sustainable change. The foundation for these models lies in developing frameworks for citizen participation in urban governance and platforms for improving the existing infrastructure. Based on this philosophy Community Policing program, encompasses active citizens’ participation in the safety of their neighborhood.
Jaagte Raho and Community policing
1) Survey – On field Roles and responsibilities include:
Skills required:
Availability: From 01/12/12 to 31/12/12 and from 01/03/13 to 31/03/13
2) Registrations – On field Roles and responsibilities include:
Skills Required:
3) Survey – On field Roles and responsibilities include:
Skills Required:
Jaagte Raho! and Community Policing
4) Design and Communication
Roles and responsibilities include:
Skills Required:
Availability: From 01/02/13 to 01/03/13
Community Policing & other Grass roots work
5) Data Entry Roles and responsibilities include:
Availability: From 15/11/12 to 15/12/12