IndiaGoverns

Transform political discourse in India by providing constituency.

http://www.indiagoverns.org/

Overview

Transform political discourse in India by providing constituency and Members of Parliament performance information to voters citizen activists and journalists.IndiaGoverns Research Institute aims to make development data matter in two ways 1. Make the development discourse between elected representatives and citizens better informed and backed by specific data rather than only relying on perceptions and 2. Enable citizen groups and elected representatives to use such government data to strengthen their demands for greater government intervention on development issues relevant to them. There are several sources of data in the public domain such as National Sample Survey National Health and Family Survey etc. But these sources collect data once in a few years and not annually. Most of these sources are 'sample' surveys (except census data) making it difficult to organise the data along individual electoral constituencies. Government collects data on development along administrative blocks. The boundaries of administrative blocks don't coincide with those of electoral constituencies. The aggregated data appears in the respective ministry's annual report but the disaggregated data remains in government files at various locations. What we do There are two core tasks to make development data matter. One is analytical in nature Organise development data along electoral constituencies (rather than along administrative districts which is the current practice in government) this renders the data comparable across neighbouring constituencies and induces a sense of competition for making claims about development. The second core task is to disseminate this information to citizens and politicians in an easy to understand manner. IndiaGoverns will use a combination of traditional methods of reaching out to citizens such as community meetings using local media and new technologies such as internet SMS to engage with large numbers of people interested in these issues. Company details