JANAAGRAHA JOURNAL
How it all began
Over the past few years, Swati and I have been asked one question more than any other, “ How did it all begin? Why did you'll decide to come back? ”
Like most grandmothers' tales, it is a long story. But let me attempt a short version.
I used to keep an infrequent diary; this is an extract from July 2, '97: Swati was visiting India with the children, I was alone in London.
“Swati called me early, 7am. We talked, as we always do on Saturday mornings, of our life: where we are headed, what our priorities are, and in the talking, we make sense of this confusing, whirling rollercoaster of a world…
Now I am alone, staring at these objects scattered around me: bed, dresser, lamp, photographs, the open doorway, the carpet, the wall hanging. And it makes no sense to me. WHAT AM I DOING HERE? A successful professional in utter despair. Everything is meaningless: getting up, brushing, eating breakfast, stepping out. Arbitrary choices… surprising we don't get carpal tunnel syndrome of the mind from all the endless garbage we stuff our lives with…
We have got to act for today, not for when we retire. Is it as simple a switch as this? What are we afraid of?”
We had met our financial and professional goals: we were respected in our fields of work. I was on a fast-track career, the bank was grooming me. Heading a $100 million business spread across Europe , member of a team that was running a $1 billion business at 33, liked by both political sections among my bosses. Swati was working with the largest architecture and design firm in the world. We had everything: money, weekend getaways to Paris or Milan, hot careers…
The truth is that all the trappings of successful professional lives are actually traps: the pay, the bonus, the perks, the lifestyle, the health insurance, the conferences around the world.
The question then is “ What next? ”
During all our years in the US, we had not thought at all about “giving back”. We had few friends in the NGO sector, and when we visited India, we would grumble like everybody else about the airports and the garbage and the traffic. Yes, we enjoyed the family company, and the smells of India, but there was a relief to get back to the calm and peace of our cocooned lives.
At the regular NRI gatherings, we would have the usual conversations about what ailed India. And all of us had all the answers. “The problem with India is…”, was how most sentences would begin. Magic wands being swished around, thousands of miles away, safe.
The more Swati and I thought about it, the more we realized that we were successful not just because of our own effort – yes, that is always necessary - but because there was an invisible “system” that enabled this search for excellence and accomplishment. It was the same system that ensured that the streets were clean and the garbage got picked up. After all, people are the same everywhere, white skin or brown or yellow: everybody would use opportunities for power and patronage. And as we looked at the differences through this filter, it started making more and more sense to us. We get frustrated at the bad roads in India, but what is the “system” that creates bad roads; we curse the garbage lying around, but what is the “system” that causes it not to get picked up; we have so many poor people in our country, with wonderful talents, but what is the “system” that prevents them from seeking their own destiny.
We knew that we didn't know enough about all this. It is amazing how little most people know about politics and government and social structures. And yet have the arrogance – because of really trivial accomplishments in a career or a business – to hold forth with high-sounding opinions.
But we also knew that we were somehow part of a fortunate group: of people who had the good fortune to see another way in another part of the world. Imagination is what drives the world. It is hard to imagine how different things can be if all you know is the slum you were born into. And just being on the other side had opened up our minds. We could rationalize this by saying, “Yes, but we did this through our own effort, we took the trouble of studying well, writing GRE and GMAT, and taking the loan from Canara bank to go abroad.” To a certain extent, that is true, there is no substitute for individual endeavour. But then, having tasted all that the world had to offer, what do we do with our good fortune? Should we keep it to ourselves?
We began to believe that we had to return, that it was the obligation of our generation to build these systems back in India. We had our health, our secure finances, our relative youth. Most importantly, each other. Most people are caught in the everyday challenges of life: difficult marriages, a sick relative, money worries. Let's face it, we are all dodging bullets every day.
And so, the rationale for returning was getting established over several months. The diary entry was an example of what we were thinking.
But like most things in life, there is always more than one reason for any action. And reason alone can only take you that far.
On our personal front, we had all four of our parents in Bangalore, all – touch wood – in good health. And getting along reasonably well with each other, imagine that!
For differing reasons, Swati and I were keen that our children got to know their grandparents. For her, because she never met either of her grandfathers, they died before she was born. For me, because my relationship with my mother's father was very special to me, until he passed away.
When we mention the family issue to most people, they nod and say knowingly, “Yes, in America, life is very selfish and money-minded” or, “Children need to have Indian values”.
Neither of these statements is true for us. Our experiences in the US, both at university and work, broke many myths that we had held about that country before we got there. We have wonderful friendships with many Americans, who care about their families and friends as much if not more than most Indians we know. We saw civic conscience and hard work an almost universal aspect of American life. Of course there were exceptions, but that's always the case.
Neither of us is religious, so this question of Indian values is a tricky one. We loved life in the West, New York and London are even now our favourite cities in the world. However, we are clear that our identity is Indian, while our worldview is a more cosmopolitan mixture. We believe that our children also need a similar sense of identity, to be able to deal with the complexities of the world as they grow up. And here, they are fortunate in that they have the opportunity to build an inter-generational link with their grandparents.
This was the other dimension of returning to India. And at the time, it was not like I am writing it, in clear black-and-white terms; back then, it was more a confusing mix of feelings. The patterns only emerged as we looked back in time.
So, we had moved from the US to London, getting – as we said – “halfway home”. We were not sure when we would pull the trigger, if at all. On one trip, in early 1998, Swati said, “ Let's check out the schools, just in case we choose to return in a year or two .”
I guess that was fateful.
A few months later, one of our close friends who lived in Chicago was returning after a trip to Delhi, and stopped over in London. She had terrible news: both her parents had been diagnosed with terminal cancer and given barely a few months to live. She was devastated. And yet, she was constrained because her husband – also a friend, a classmate of mine – had just started an MBA, and she was supporting both of them with her job. The usual trappings: paycheck, insurance, bills. She left on Friday. Swati and I spent the weekend talking about their situation.
We told ourselves, “ What are we waiting for? There are never going to be any signposts saying ‘Important moment coming up, turn left'. We just have to make the leap .” All the traps, the benefits, the insurance, the business-class trips, the paid-for movers, all of it seemed irrelevant.
And so, on Monday morning, we quit. Just like that. That's what it came to, all the discussions and debates over the past several months.
My bank made me feel good, they refused to accept the resignation, flew in someone from New York to dissuade me. “ Whom are you joining, and how much are they paying you? ”, he asked. It is a standard banking practice, jumping ship for fat bonuses. I laughed, “ No, I'm not leaving for another bank. I'm leaving for another life .”
I finally left that Friday. I will never forget that evening, as I left our office at the Strand. I told myself, “This ID card wont work any more, the doors wont click open when I swish this card.” It was late, I left by the side entrance, a London cabbie pulled up and the leaves swirled in a quiet ballet.
“ Late day at work? ”, he asked me as he pulled away.
“ Nope, I just quit ”, I smiled at him in the rear view mirror, and watched his mouth drop.
I felt like a thousand balloons had been tied to me.
In the next issue, I will talk about our journey of discovering democracy, after we returned to India.
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Discovering Democracy
W e returned to India in May 1998. The anticipation of the last few months in London as we packed was exhilarating, returning to a complete blank slate: Swati and I had absolutely no plans, except that we wanted to start a phase of “giving something back”.
Shunori – our daughter – was seven, Rishab was not even two. We had a talk with Shunori about returning, and how she felt about it. “Well, there are good things about living here, but there are also good things about India”, she said, “I can spend time with my grandparents”. She had always been more mature than her age.
While things were quite open-ended, each of us had a sense of what we were looking for. I had established some boundary conditions: one, I wanted to work from my area of strength, finance; two, I wanted to have an impact on some scale; three, I wanted to help the urban poor, I had heard of several rural microfinance successes.
For Swati, she wanted to stay connected to design. Her work in London and the US had been almost exclusively on the Corporate front, working with Fortune 500 companies, designing their corporate offices. While she had enjoyed her work, she felt that India could open new doors for her, both in terms of creativity and also in terms of users. She also had the classic gender constraint: Rishab was only two, and she cared a lot about him having a solid parental presence until he started going to school.
Both of us felt quite passionately about urban issues, given that we are both children of urban India. While we knew that there was a lot wrong with our villages, we could not connect as much.
The first six months after our return were spent in this open-ended process. Meeting new people, some in the grassroots, others into advocacy issues. One contact would lead to another (“Oh, you are interested in this, you must meet so-and-so..”). It was like being a pinball in a machine, getting bounced around. Some of the contacts were out of town, so we would travel around.
During this time, we began reading seriously about India, its politics, economics, history and democracy and its leaders. The standard books, of which some were more interesting than others. A latent, lifelong curiosity about Gandhi was finally fed. Nehru, Khilnani, Guha, Seshan, Rangarajan, Thapar, Shourie, Palkhivala, Tully…it was a potpourri of reading, some delightful, some dogmatic, all delivering us into a different world.
We were struck by how little we really knew about our own country, how typically middle-class we had been in simply accepting all around us as givens, while we merrily went about finding the moorings of our own lives, like plucking all the ripe fruits in an orchard that others had spent their lives creating and tending to.
We began to feel a deep sense of gratitude and humility, of standing on the shoulders of giants, of how much we owed to the past. And with it, a reinforcement of our own responsibility in taking the story forward, of scripting the next chapter.
I don't want to sound like the only emotion I felt was one of awe and respect. As I scratched beneath the surface of the NGO “industry” (it is one), I realized that only 3 or 4 out of every 100 people I met were truly remarkable, doing outstanding work, with intellectual rigour, and being open-minded about it. Unfortunately, I discovered that the majority were no different from the people you would meet in any industry, often worse. Worse because somehow the fact that they were involved in social work had become a tag of sorts, a moral halo that they wore with gusto. Many were in ideological dead-ends, territorial and often lacked integrity.
To my luck, two of the NGO that I respected were based in Bangalore: Myrada, a grassroots organization working in rural development in several states, and spearheading the microfinance revolution in the country; and Public Affairs Centre, a research organisation working on governance issues. In December 1998, I took the first steps in my areas of interest: microfinance with Myrada, and governance with PAC. My hope was that somehow, at some point in the future, these two paths could converge. Both streams began in January 1999, the new year heralding a new life for me. Swati was less active over these next two years, doing a bit of design work, finding her feet in India, settling the family in.
Both paths have now been running in parallel for close to six years now, and it feels like the blink of an eye. I can see the convergence beginning to take place, but barely.
My microfinance life has been running a parallel track to Janaagraha over the past six years, working in the slums of Bangalore with NGO partners (now close to 30). But this story is about democracy and governance, which is the second path.
As I learnt more about the 3-tier governmental structure of the country, I began to understand the increasing importance of local government. I felt that the logical place to start my political education would be at the local government level. Dr Paul of PAC introduced me to Dr Ravindra, who was the MD of Karnataka Urban Infrastructure Development and Finance Corporation (KUIDFC) at the time.
I remember that first meeting with the three of us. KUIDFC's offices were on Cunningham Road. We were in Dr Ravindra's well-appointed room. Dr Paul introduced me, and I said, “I have extensive experience in the financial sector, and would like to contribute something on issues of public finance. Are there things that I could do?”
Dr Ravindra was very responsive. “Yes, of course, we have an ADB loan that we have taken for 4 towns around Bangalore , maybe you could help us in something there.”
I asked for some background papers. He summoned one Parthasarathy, “Please give Mr Ramanathan all the files pertaining to financial reform in this project.”
Parthasarathy dusted off a small ring-bound file, about 30 pages. I asked him, “Is this all you have?”, and he said, “Yes sir, ishte ide.”
I flipped through it, saw the name of a Delhi-based consulting company, and called them. The concerned consultant had since left the firm; I tracked him in Chennai. He said, “There are a lot more documents pertaining to financial reform in local bodies.” When I said that the KUIDFC did not have any, he asked me to get in touch with a sericulture consultant in Bangalore who could possibly guide me. When I met him at his house, he looked at the file and laughed. “There are about 15 documents, some of which are hundreds of pages, about financial reform.”
“But where are they?”, I asked, “KUIDFC doesn't seem to have them.”
“They won't. Go to BMRDA, and ask the second-division assistant there, and he can give them to you.”
My early learning about government.
I met the assistant at BMRDA, who was suspicious about why I wanted these old reports. I promised to return them after xeroxing them.
Over the next few days, I devoured these documents: they talked of the mess of accounting systems in local governments, not only in India, but all over the world. Cities did not have basic information about their cash positions, the projects that were under way, the payroll and pension obligations, the land and buildings that they owned, not even the number of bank accounts that they had. As I read this with horror, I began to understand one of the critical issues hampering even the good people in government: poor quality information. The quality of decisions is driven by the quality of information. And this internal plumbing simply did not seem to exist in government.
I began to read and research more: the international best practices in governmental financial management, when these reforms began, the emerging standards on these issues, and so on.
The reports also talked of the changes that were required, and the difficulties involved in these changes. One of them mentioned how Mysore had completed the transformation to a modern accounting system. I was excited to see this, so drove off to Mysore. Nothing seemed to be different. I asked the Chief Accounts Officer, “What about the accounting changes, what has happened to them?”
“Are you talking about computers?”, he asked, “As soon as the consultants left, some other project took away the computers.”
There had been no process re-engineering to ensure that such complex change was actually done correctly, with the cooperation and ownership of the local staff. I then went to the other 3 towns, and saw the same issues.
Along the way, I had been reading about success stories of governance in the world. I was particularly taken up with participatory budgeting in a city called Porto Alegre in Brazil, where citizens and government worked together to determine the city's development priorities, with the budget reflecting these priorities. Porto Alegre had become an astonishing success over 10 years. I became even more convinced of the importance of getting the accounting system, and budgeting processes cleaned up, so that we could then take up citizen participation on a solid footing. The foundation would have been laid.
I went back to Dr Ravindra. “You have to implement the financial reforms of the reports. In fact, it even suggests that Mysore is done, but that is not the case. We could do it, if we were to focus single-mindedly on the job.”
Dr Ravindra was interested. “How would we go about this? Who would be the institution that would take responsibility?”
I asked PAC if they would be interested in taking this up as a project, and I would anchor the project at no cost. They agreed, and we spent the next few months putting together a proposal for KUIDFC; much to my chagrin, a smaller town – Tumkur – was selected, because the others felt that it would be too difficult to take on Mysore.
In this process, I saw the pace of decision-making within government: a slow, ponderous one, which is hard to accelerate. Unlike the private sector, where an individual middle-manager has tremendous latitude to implement a project, government has – rightly – several processes that need to be followed. Hence, governmental decision-making will necessarily be slow, but deliberate. The institutional framework is completely different. Unfortunately, even if one can accept the pace of decision-making, sometimes even the results are distorted because of various other factors, and it is this second that is frustrating.
By this time, it was November 1999. The state elections happened, and Chief Minister Krishna announced the Bangalore Agenda Task Force. I – like many others – wrote to Nandan, offering my services. I had begun to believe passionately that no change in government could be effective or sustainable without first cleaning up the internal financial systems.
Swati and I met with Naresh Narasimhan, an architect and member of the BATF. He invited us to attend the early sessions of the BATF. After a few days, I wrote to Nandan, explaining my view on the need for fundamental internal transformation of city governments, led by financial reform. He asked for a presentation, was as amazed as I had been at the poor state of financial systems, and data quality.
“Can we fix this?”, he asked.
“It's extremely tough, but it can be done”, I said, “but it will take time. I need to put together a team of 20-25 people, and need about two years. We will have a single-line mission statement to move the BMP to a modern, international quality financial management system. And we will ensure that the BMP staff will run it.”
Nandan wanted to champion this as one of the BATF projects. He also committed to finance the entire cost of the project from his personal funds, and invited me to join the BATF to run the project.
I told Nandan, “This is garage work, it is not something that will get high visibility. People care about schools and roads and hospitals, not about accounting systems. Are you willing to support something that cannot get publicity?”
He said, “We need a mix of initiatives, some core reform, others that are more visible. This is important, and I want to do it.”
Many people asked me whether we could actually do this, given how complicated government systems were; others were sceptical that any value would actually come out of all this plumbing work, whether there would be transparency and accountability, which is eventually what the citizen wanted. Several asked whether it was worth the unknown amount of time, just to put a foundation on which citizens could then start participating.
I felt very strongly that this was the only sustainable answer. Anything else would be simply getting citizens agitated temporarily, without long-term outcomes.
The BATF project took off in January 2000. Over the next two years, it was a roller-coaster ride, but it taught me an incredible amount about how local government functioned. More importantly, it laid the foundation for citizen participation, and for the eventual beginning of Janaagraha.
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Fixing the supply Side
Between December 1999 and June 2001, I plunged into reforming the accounting system of the Bangalore Mahanagara Palike, as part of the Bangalore Agenda Task Force (BATF). A small core team had formed over the course of the project for Tumkur: Murali, a remarkable chartered accountant with a passion for process; two retired State Accounts Department officers, Mr Srinivas Murthy and Mr Nagaraj Gupta; we hired a dedicated team of 20 young graduates, some of whom displayed excellent leadership qualities over the course of the project. To champion this process on the inside, we created a new role for a finance expert in the BMP, beyond the Chief Accounts Officer. P K Srihari, an officer from the Revenue Service was brought in to lead the effort from the BMP's side.
We spent the first four months doing a process mapping of the various activities at the BMP: there are more than a thousand items of receipts and expenditures. For example, who is responsible to collect property taxes, what forms do they fill out when they make a demand notice, what happens to each of the copies that gets made, when does this hit the accounts department, how does this get reconciled with the bank account, and so on. This process was repeated for each income and expenditure item: building licenses, trade licenses, horticulture, stores and workshop, education, health, solid waste management, engineering…the list was endless.
Helping us in this was a volunteer force of young chartered accountant interns from the firm of SDU. Thousands of man hours were spent on completing the mapping.
The mapping was important because without it, we would not know the current business processes of the BMP. And with this, the job descriptions of the 14,000-odd people who carried out various activities. The clean-up of the accounts was not simply an accounting exercise, it was fundamentally a business-process-reengineering activity. And to do this intelligently, one had to first understand how the current process worked. This needs to be understood, so that the useful processes are retained, the extraneous ones eliminated, and new processes introduced. And in the definition of the process, there will be a logical connection to the accounting system: every transaction links either to the collection of money, or to the spending of it.
This process mapping was also important to build the right technology platform for the organization. Generally, governments have an approach that an IAS officer once told me was called “AC by PC”, that is, create an excuse to get a computer, so that you can get an airconditioned office. Unfortunately, computerization will not help unless the internal processes are first cleaned up.
The other benefit of doing this was that people understood their jobs, and how it connected into the larger institutional goal. Committing to build us a customised software application at no cost was a Bangalore firm called Crossdomain.
Most importantly, the accounting exercise was actually to build the backbone of information flow in the organization. What did this mean? Well, for example, in the past, if the DC (Revenue) had to know what the property tax collections were, he would ask for a meeting of all the assistant revenue officers (AROs); there are 28 ARO offices in Bangalore. Each office would scramble to compile the collections from a book called DCB: Demand-collection-balance. Unfortunately, these numbers were often not completely reliable, either because they were not updated or sometimes due to deliberate fraud. The claims of revenue collection ultimately had to be cross-checked with the bank balances, because that was the true picture of the cash position.
Because this information was so poorly organised, it was only available with a lag-time of 45-50 days. The same was true for all departments, either involved in the collection of money or the spending of it. This meant that the Commissioner could get information about revenue position for December only in February; and even this was an estimate. It had huge implications on various decisions: the financial health of the organization, which expenditures to take up, which payments to make, whom to reward for good performance and whom to penalize for poor work.
On the expenditure side, it was worse. When we began the exercise, I remember asking the Chief Engineer, “Sir, how many works are currently there in the BMP?” he said, “Well, there are 100 wards, and approximately 10-15 works in each ward. So I would say, maybe 1500 works.”
I asked, “How can you say ‘approximately'? if you don't know precisely, how can you determine which works are running beyond schedule, which are having cost-overruns, which ones you want to inspect tomorrow morning?” This meant completely mapping the works process from birth to death: how does a work get created for approval, what is the approval process from the works committee, how is the detailed estimate prepared, how does it get technical and administrative sanction, what is the tender process resulting in the award of the contract called the work order, and what are the processes during execution and payments, including the withholding of performance guarantees. On paper, this is how it is supposed to work; in reality, there was many a slip between the cup and the lip. We could all shake our heads and say, “typical government, everything is broken.” However, this won't solve the problem: what was needed was a clear process to be put in place to ensure that what is defined on paper is indeed what is followed in practice. In order for us to know how many works were there, we had to map all the works that were in various stages of the process, then capture their costs and liabilities. We prepared a detailed format to collect this information. But given the corruption in the system, how were we going to get all this information? This is where the political support for the BATF was important: the Chief Minister backed the project completely, and at various stages ensured that it did not get torpedoed. The Commissioner at the time was also a very good IAS officer, Shantanu Consul. He saw the power of what we were suggesting, and issued a circular that no payments to any contractors would be made without all this information being made available, no payments would be released.
All hell broke loose. The engineers protested, saying that they had too much pending work, this was unnecessary excess workload, and so on. He was unmoved. Finally, the system did the next thing it knew best: it dumped us with all kinds of useless information.
I remember the first day we got this information. We were all excited about the Commissioner's circular, giving a deadline of 1 week. At the end of the deadline, the forms started pouring into the special computerized accounts office we had set up. As we started examining the forms, we realized that the information was quite useless. And it was coming in bunches, from all parts of the city. What were we to do?
I said, “Let us computerize everything that is coming in. Don't leave anything out.”
We worked all night, making sure that we tabulated everything. By ten the next morning, we had printouts for each zonal office (there are 12 zones in the city), listing all the works that they had given us, much of it gibberish. There were exceptions of course, engineers who came in to tell us that finally someone was doing the right thing. We delivered all this to the respective offices; the engineers told the commissioner, “We told you this was useless, these fellows know nothing!”
We said, “Yes, sir, we agree. The mistakes are all ours. Can you please correct all the mistakes and give it back to us, we will change the information and return it to you!”
Over the next three months, we spent every night in the BMP office, invariably until 2 or 3 in the morning, diligently computerizing all the data that came in. It took 15-20 cycles to improve the quality of the information. With each cycle, we got wiser. We saw how works were approved in different years; we noticed how some were road works, others were drain works, still more were for parks and so on; we saw the difference between maintenance and capital works; we noticed that we could see which ward the work belonged to. From all this, we decided to create a work-code for each work, so that we could track the work from birth to death.
When we completed the exercise, we discovered that the total number of works in the system was over 8,500. more than five times what the Chief Engineer thought existed! And the total liability? Over Rs 250 crores, made up of small bits and pieces of Rs 3 lakh works.
Now imagine, without such detailed information within the organisation, that citizens make claims to participate, and want to know about the works in their ward: there could be no sustainable solution. Maybe one officer could help out, but the moment he or she got transferred, all progress would halt. This was why I believed passionately that internal reforms were necessary: to equip those well-meaning people inside the government with the right tools to respond to citizens. Otherwise, we would only be raising the irritation level.
We had to do the same exercise for each department. And with this, build the process so that each department head could get the right information, at the right time. There were other challenges. For example, the banking relationships. The city did not know how many bank accounts it had, there were hundreds, each with money lying unused for months, sometimes years. We proposed rationalizing the banking relationships. Another example was the assets of the BMP; there was no record of the properties owned by the city. Many of these were commercially very attractive, and could be used to generate additional revenues for the city, if done in the form of intelligent joint-ventures.
We then did the process re-engineering for each department. Changed the forms, created daily checks, so that the errors could be reduced. Overcame the resistance from the personnel. Saw how many good officers and employees were there, people who would come up to us every day and beg us not to stop.
The idea was to move the city's accounting system to a modern, double-entry system. This needed the law to be changed. I prepared a White Paper on Bangalore's finances. The Commissioner then requested a meeting with the Chief Minister, putting out a plan for the city's restructuring. At this review, a unique MoU was arrived at between the state and the city, where the state promised to provide financial support to the city, with the condition that the city undertook reforms. First among these reforms was the adoption of a modern, Fund-based Accounting System (FBAS).
Nandan held monthly reviews with the entire team. The whole process took 30 months, over 250,000 man hours. The new systems were in, the law was passed, the personnel were trained. It was exhausting, but exhilarating and immensely educational. The job is still not complete; there are still pieces left to be done, like building a concurrent audit process and so on. But our work as BATF was done.
This did not mean that corruption ended. It only meant that we could now know, to a reasonable degree, how much corruption was there! The city continued to make many decisions that we felt were wrong, sometimes evidently driven by considerations that were not transparent. However, our approach in this exercise was that the role of the BATF was not to expose or interfere in these processes. We were there in an unusual capacity, and needed to exercise caution in fulfilling our role. Building the systems was ok, everything else had to happen through the regular democratic process, however long it took.
By this time, it was June 2001. Time to now bring the citizens in.
In the next issue, I will talk about the last leg of this journey: the genesis of Janaagraha
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The Birth of Janaagraha
As a member of the BATF, I had anchored the completion of a major part of the financial restructuring of Bangalore City Corporation by June 2001. Twenty months, twenty-two people, two hundred thousand man-hours. The internal plumbing of information was now largely in place. Half the work had been done: supply-side reform. Time to bring in the other half: demand-side participation.
The whole exercise was meant to be the basis for citizen involvement in an organized, scientific manner. I had been inspired by the Porto Alegre model in Brazil, where participatory budgeting had proven to be so successful: doubling of the city budget, improvement of transparency, dramatic change in the quality of life on several counts.
When the accounting exercise was done, we had planned to move to citizen participation in the planning activities, starting with the budget. Over the course of this exercise, we had seen four commissioners. Around April 2001, I began the discussions with the latest commissioner on how to now bring citizens into the budgeting activities of the BMP for the next budget, to be announced in January 2002, for the year 2002-03. He kept saying, “Yes, we will do it, let us discuss this next week”, and so on. Never saying no, but never committing yes. Finally, after a few months of these delays, I requested a meeting with Nandan and the commissioner. It was in Infosys, late one evening in August.
I started, “One of the reasons for the accounting reforms was so that we could have citizen participation. And now that the accounting work is pretty much done, we are ready to bring citizens into the budgeting process for the next budget, 2002-03, to be announced in January.”
Nandan added, “We have been talking of this for a few months now, and it is time to go ahead. We need a clear signal now.”
The commissioner finally made his position clear. “We cannot do it now. The BMP council elections are due in November. We cannot do anything that would cause the Election Commission to take action against us. So we have to wait until after the elections.”
“But that is not until November or December”, I protested, “by then it will be too late for the coming year's budget. This is a gigantic exercise, getting citizens across the entire city to participate. And it has never been done before, there will be mistakes, we need to learn from some pilots and then scale this up.”
Nandan said, “OK, if you cannot do this, the BATF will take this up for the time being. And then the BMP can join in after the elections. This way, we won't lose any time.”
And this was when the full hand was revealed. “If we cannot do it, you cannot do it as well. The BATF is a creature of the government, you have the same constraints as we do. I am sorry, but this citizen participation idea cannot begin.”
The meeting ended. Three years of working towards a single goal looked like it was being crushed.
As I drove home, I called Swati. I was frustrated. “It is not going to come through”, I said, “in fact, it is clear to me now, the system will never want this.”
As I described the situation, Swati said, “Maybe this is the right thing to happen, Ramesh. Maybe the citizens need a platform that can never be hijacked, a platform that belongs to them and no one else.” Start this platform, she said.
“But how, when, what do I have?” I spluttered.
“Let us do it together, I will work with you to make this happen”, she said, calming me down.
We spent the entire night talking about the sudden idea, little knowing how it was going to overwhelm us in the years to come. By the morning, it was clear what needed to be done. Over the past three years, Swati had been involved indirectly in the BATF work, supporting me. Rishab had just started school that summer, and she finally had her chance to start her design work that she had been planning all along. Now, she was giving this up.
I called Nandan later that morning, “We are committed to the citizen participation idea, Nandan”, I said, “Swati and I are planning to start something for this. And so, I am submitting my resignation from the BATF.”
“Nonsense!”, Nandan said, “I can see why you want to start this, and I can see how the BATF is constrained. You don't have to leave the BATF, and I assure you of all my support.”
We called it CPG: Campaign for Participatory Governance. There was no name. We discussed the idea with the first friends whom we knew in development, Ashish and Munira Sen. In their house, with our children playing, we drew up the broad plan. Then we discussed it with Unni Rajagopal, our friend at SDU, the Chartered Accountancy firm.
Our first presentation outside this group of friends was to a group of 5 people - including Dharen Chadda of Momentum, the communications strategy firm - in a small, unlit room in Vishranti Nilayam off Infantry Road. The response was overwhelming: “Go for it!”, they said.
Swati anchored the entire backbone of the campaign. She pored over every little detail, every process to ensure that “citizen participation” was not an empty phrase, it actually meant something concrete, with specific outputs. One example was converting the citizens' wish list into a fully-costed printout that they could then use to prioritise within their ward: there were hundreds of tiny steps involved in going from “my road needs to be asphalted”, to being able to sit with hundreds of others in the entire ward, with full data of all the requirements, in real money terms, and prioritising the needs. This was what participation was about: scientific engagement in a well-structured process, with good quality data.
There were several people who gave up their lives over the next few months: Mr Manjunath, an acquaintance who was a builder and an ex-BMP contractor, worked with Swati to give the specifications for the software to cost the engineering works exactly the way the government would, following their Public Works Department Schedule of Rates. Ashish and Munira took the launching of this campaign as a personal priority, and allowed their lives to be invaded on every issue. Anjana Iyer came on board to work with 3 pilot communities, helping us learn how to actually go about getting citizen participation. Dharen Chaddha and Ashutosh anchored communications. Mr Venkataramanan of Indiranagar RISE was the first community leader to take to the idea: he helped create a simple and easy-to-use system to collect information from non-technical citizens. Col. Rudra joined as our first volunteer, anchoring administration when there wasn't even an office; he had four weeks to set us up before we launched the campaign. Rohini Nilekani called us saying, “You'll are doing something exciting! I want you to know that you have my full support”, and within a few days, helped bring us the mass media support that we needed.
As all this was happening, we needed to do the communications work in parallel. Despite all the back-end work, the first challenge was to attract citizens to join the campaign. We knew that once they came, they would be overwhelmed by all the detailed preparation that we had done. However, without government support, with just a group of citizens launching this somewhat crazy idea, we needed a powerful message to get citizens to stir out of their homes. We held focus group sessions with different citizen groups: retired people, college students, home-makers, to ask them what they thought of government, whether they felt citizen involvement could be the answer, and whether they would participate.
From these sessions, we learned many things about what held people back: they cared deeply about the city; they were cynical of government; they wanted to believe that they could make a difference; they were tired of seeing yet another do-gooder activity that would disappear like water droplets in the desert; they wanted reasurrance that any new idea had the basic credibility to make them stir.
As far as the approach of any such campaign was concerned, there was a choice to make: should we take a confrontational approach, or try a different track. There was a deep-rooted anger, a negative energy that could be harnessed through a confrontational approach. But this had limitations. More importantly, it was not consistent with the fundamental belief that there were good people in government as well. Two years of working inside the BMP had exposed me to several of them. As we discussed this approach, Dharen asked, “If this campaign was a person, and he or she walked in through the door, who would it be? Which personality best captures the values and ethos of this idea?” Several names were suggested, but it was clear that one name exemplified all that we aspired to be: Gandhi, as he returned in 1914 to India, full of hope and optimism to transform the trajectory of our country. And doing it in a manner that gave a new meaning to ‘constructive engagement'.
So this was our approach: a firm, constructive engagement with the government, a fresh start, one that was infused with positive energy rather than negativity. Now, this needed to be packaged into a communications idea, to convince the citizen that we could succeed, that it would be worth their effort. We were clear that we would use all the successful practices of the private sector in our work: communications, technology, process management and so on.
We believed strongly that just because the work was in the public space, we had no excuse to be less than professional in our commitment or delivery. Our target market was the average citizen, not the activist. The message was “practical patriotism” where one did not have to give up one's life to make a difference; that you could still have your family and work and entertainment, and also be an active citizen. We were like any other product on the supermarket shelf. Our product was “participation”, the currency with which the citizen was buying our product was “time”. Given the pressures that are placed on the average citizen's time, it was important to ensure that we had a process that gave them value-for-time.
A communications idea had emerged, one that would have opinion leaders of the city endorsing the campaign, and asking citizens to take responsibility. Nandan was already a supporter; Devraj of SDU knew Vishnu Vardhan, got an interview for us; we met him in his dressing room at a shooting, with his make-up still on. Ashutosh spoke to Syed Kirmani, and I went to meet Dr Devi Shetty. All four of them agreed to publicly support the campaign in any mass media advertising effort.
Meera Pillai, a documentary film-maker introduced by Ashish, came to one of the grassroot citizen meetings that we had started holding. At the end, she said, “Hi, I'm Meera and I am making a short film of what you are about. It is an impressive idea. I need three days.” I was bowled over. It was a Thursday evening. She sent us the script on Friday; we discussed it on Saturday; shot it on Sunday at Nrityagram (Lynne was very kind to allow us to shoot there); edited it on Monday and had it delivered to us by the evening!
We had no clue how much the whole campaign would cost. A rough estimate done late in September suggested about Rs one crore. Swati and I looked at each other and said, “If we are passionate about it, then let us do it with excellence. No short-cuts.” We spoke to Unni, and he ensured that Ramanathan Foundation that we had started earlier to support various causes could be used to finance this campaign.
We still needed a name and a logo. Several candidates were considered, and rejected. Along the way, I had been reading about Gandhi. One morning, I was shaving, and telling Swati how he had come up with the name “Satyagraha” for the civil disobedience movement in South Africa: the combination of “Satya” and “Agraha”, meaning the moral force of truth. As I said this, she shouted excitedly, “I've got it!! I've got the name”, I nicked myself at the sudden outburst.
“What is it?” I asked. “'Jana – agraha' the moral force of the people”, she said, “It's perfect.” We spoke to Sanskrit experts, making sure of the meaning, and the various interpretations of “agraha”. It worked in all languages.
The three months leading to the launch were mad: sleepless nights, days rolling into nights, children forgotten with our parents, grassroot meetings to understand the citizen response and fine tune the launch. Little did we know that this was nothing compared to what would happen to our lives after the launch.
On December 8 th , 2001, we launched Janaagraha. There was a small press conference. There was also a half-page advertisement with Nandan, Syed Kirmani, Devi Shetty and VishnuVardhan, saying, “Here are some foolish people who believe they can transform Bangalore”, going on to say that dreams are always made by fools. It asked the citizen, “If you are a fool, call us!”
Thousands got in touch. In letters, through phone calls, at local meetings. “I am a fool, I am willing to dream, tell me what to do!”, each one of them said.
The madness had begun.