TD proposes a participatory and collaborative understanding of governance practices based on active citizenship to inform the development of a digital networked platform for public discourse in the context of RTI, NREGA and PDS in rural Karnataka. The Right to Information Act (RTI) ensures the realization of the fundamental human right to information in India. The National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) provides employment guarantee to secure household livelihoods in rural India. The Public Distribution System (PDS) is a food access mechanism to ensure food security for the alleviation of poverty. The value of the proposed platform for actors in Indian governance is to enable a fair share of challenges for Citizens, Consumers, Regulators, Executive/Bureaucracy, Legislators/Politicians, and Judiciary.

The current vision of the technical intervention is an Internet enabled Wiki with support for mobile phones and multimedia. Mobile phones and multimedia have been arrived at while considering the textually and digitally non-literate factions of the population for whom access to information counts the most and who have also contributed to the increasing adoption of the mobile phone as a tool for communication. Multimedia support enables the attachment of still images, audio and video files to Wiki pages by the mobile phone or a web browser. This could be used by a government official or interested party to store a still image of public works in progress; it could be used by an illiterate Panchayat member to record the receipt of funds by filing a voice report; it could be used by a local journalist to record a public statement made by a government official. The Wiki itself is to be bi-lingual and users will be able to author pages in both English and Kannada. In addition: In the last one year since the initiation of the project activities have involved,

a. building a common vocabulary within the diverse core project team, which include FOSS developers, a grassroots advocacy network and media researchers;
b. investigating NGO, activist led interventions and citizen based movements employing creative media for rights awareness;
c. investigating field level implementations of corporate social responsibility and government lead interventions within RTI and NREGA;
d. engaging with academic and policy level discourse on media and democracy;
e. proposal building to seek funds the communication, development and rollout of the tool;

Current activities include ethnographic inquiry of democratic governance practices in India (funded by the private Swedish foundation Wahlgrenska Stiftelsen); and the communication of early version mobile phone based prototypes with diverse actors in governance (with the support of the Media Lab, University of Art and Design Helsinki)

Locations