Thanks for coming to what is now the fourth or fifth one of our esteemed development seminars.
This time we have 1 or 2 more left on the program, so have a look, um, online to see what you might be missing if you don't come to the next year.
Uh, but today I'm very happy to be able to introduce, um, Vivek, uh, Srinivasan.
Um, Vivek's, uh, program manager of the program on Liberation Technology at Stanford.
And he used to work as an activist, the India's Right to Food campaign,
and what he was doing that was trying to make sure that everyone in India has access to basic public services.
And that then led him to his PhD at the Maxwell School on understanding Tamil Nadu success in providing basic services.
And then that work is in his recent book that's actually published by Oxford University Press.
It's called Delivering Public Services Effectively, Tamil Nadu and Beyond.
I think it just came out, uh, a few months ago. He has a copy of that.
Um, I was going to say a bit about the topic that Vivek's talking about, um,
combating corruption with mobile phones, but I think I'll just leave that for you to talk about.
Um, we will we'll talk for about half an hour now.
We'll have about 20, 30 minutes for questions and conversations afterwards.
We have some drinks outside for everyone to be able to partake in and mingle and ask any questions that didn't get asked here and then.
I think some people might be going to the pub afterwards to continue some of those sessions, but for now, let me just hand over to Vivek.
So thank thank you for coming. Thank you. Thanks, Mark, and thank you, Ben for organising this.
It's fantastic to be here at Oxford and with especially for a who is podcast, among other things.
I've been listening and so I've been consuming many of your work, um, in my very long commute in California.
So great to be here.
So what I do is to talk about the ongoing project, which is two years old, but it's fairly young, um, which I'm doing in different parts of India.
So talk about the genesis of the project and also some of the tweaks that I had to do along the way in order to make it,
um, a little bit more effective, or at least to give, uh, give it a greater semblance of promise.
This would be, um, Genesis is in my activist past as, um, someone who was working with India's Right to Vote campaign.
The campaign was very effective in getting a series of different legal entitlements on the right to food.
Um,
the first legal entitlement of the campaign was able to get was to make school feeding a legal right for every child going to public school in India,
which now covers about 130 million children. But the biggest of them came with what's called as the Employment Guarantee Act.
Uh, has anybody heard about India's entrega, the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act?
So let me give a very quick background. It's it's a kind of a workfare program.
What it does is that any person living in a rural area can apply for work with the government, and they should be provided work within 15 days.
The nature of work is casual manual labour. So you do have to work and you're given minimum wages.
Um, which is about uh, I mean ₹150 today, which is probably around £2, uh, for a very hard day of work.
So typically the only people who come for this kind of work is anyone who doesn't have other things to fall back upon.
And the family can get up to 100 days of work in a year.
So it's really seen as a fallback option so that people don't have to migrate in distress or they don't have to fall hungry.
But it's also become one of the largest welfare programs anywhere in the world, uh, with a fairly substantial allocation in India's national budget.
So why are you even getting these entitlements?
We were also very conscious that if you get these big budgets, but if it doesn't reach people, it doesn't mean anything at all.
So the method that we started following was from the success of what is called as the right to information movement in India,
and they followed a particular, um, process, which is that they would go to a village and according to India's information law,
they would demand all the records for that particular project.
So if it's, let's say welfare project, they'll say, give me a list of all the works that have happened.
Give me a list of all the people who worked in it, how much money was each person paid, what assets we created, etc., etc. so you obtain the records.
Now all the records are written chronologically, right? One of the accounts chronologically.
But when you want to verify the records, which is the object of this particular exercise, it's actually a very long process.
Uh, but let's say that even though we do have a strong right information law in the country.
So if you look at just the legal, uh, uh, aspect of what kind of records citizens can get and what records are exempted,
India has one of the strongest right information laws in the world.
But despite that, we often have to go on a protest like this one in order to get the records.
Um, it's. Especially if you're really challenging, uh, the people in the administration.
Once you get the record, this is what it looks like in the welfare program.
For example, this is called the muster roll out, a list of attendance, someone who attended a project.
You have to, um, you get reams and reams of muster rolls for any given project.
Now you have to do a simple exercise, which is that we typically take the name of the first person,
flip through all the pages of records, find out how many days this person worked,
take the second name you flip through all the page pages again, and then, um,
ask them to be prepared for a simple question that you can ask an individual.
According to the records, you worked in this project for so many days, and you have made so much money, and it's a very laborious process.
And this was one social audit that I organised for, uh, that preparatory work that you did for one audit of 25 villages.
So I had to house and feed about 100 people for a whole week just to prepare the records before we could go to a household and ask people question.
So thanks to this process, and it requires a lot of knowledge in terms of asking for the right papers.
So to give you an example,
it's possible for an official to give you all the correct records and give and just not give you a photocopy of the wrong papers.
So you need to know, um, just to compute the whole amount, um, number of days that people have worked and see if it matches with the total.
Uh, you need to ask. You just can't go and ask an official to give me all the records you need to know, uh, give me the muster roll management book,
etc., etc., which means you need to know the program so it requires a lot of knowledge and skill to do a social audit.
And it also requires a lot of preparatory work to do.
One, thanks to this, I felt that even though the social audit process seemed to be very powerful,
powerful to the point that a lot of social audits and the public hearings that follow them,
um, you find people who have been making money for a long time coming and returning money in a public meeting.
Um, typically you find that officials were indulging in corruption, um, get very, very threatened during the process of a social audit.
This is an experience most auditors have.
But the process is so cumbersome, and you need skills that you often have external people then coming and doing audits that you rarely have,
audits repeated in any given village, um, multiple times over many years.
So a lot of um officials have told me that I know, okay, you're coming and you're shaking me up today, but you won't be here forever.
So which means that I go back to my ways. So why even do this?
So it is in this context that I started feeling that the, um, even though social audit is a powerful, um,
there are there's a lot of road work that happens which could be done easily using
technology in a context where e-governance is taking off in a large way in India.
So all these accounts that are getting available digitally in many programs, many welfare programs in particular, simultaneously,
there's a mobile phone revolution with, uh, a very large proportion of households in rural India getting access to mobile phones.
So even in one of the poorest states in the country, about half the households have mobile phones.
Um, as the Census Commission put it, there are many more households that have mobile phones today than toilets.
Um,
so that presents to me an opportunity where I can access public records online and disseminated to people on a continuous basis using mobile phones.
So which is the attempt that I'm doing in this particular project?
Um, so what I will do is to go through some of the challenges that I've had, um, and also explain, um, how we are trying to tweak the process.
So it's happening now in four different states in each place.
We work on a different program, uh, Employment Guarantee Act being one that, um, because it's implemented across the country.
That's something we work on.
Um, the second program that we focus on a lot is the public distribution system, which is a way of giving subsidies, rice and other grains, um,
to the population living below the poverty line, which is also a national program, but we work on it in certain states due to data availability.
Let me pause here for a moment and take a short detour, which is that in the context where I'm trying to do this kind of work,
that had a bunch of people who started asking the question of whether transparency works in the first place, um, to name three recent naysayers.
One of them, um, um, a colleague about whom we were talking about a moment back, Jemmy Weinstein.
Um, so these are scholars. All of them are political scientists have done randomised experiments, um, using a transparency measure.
Jeremy Weinstein and Humphreys, what they did was to create a scorecard of,
uh, performance of parliamentarians, um, in I'm not sure if it's in Nigeria.
Um, let me go to country for the moment.
And then they distributed, uh, in a very, very, very large, um, um, scale in the country in which they are working in,
uh, and they wanted to see whether this form of transparency changes how people vote, uh,
whether people who are MPs who are better performers tend to get voted in better,
um, similarly, Dan Posner and Guy Grothman did transparency interventions,
and all of them came back with, uh, practically the same response that transparency interventions don't work.
So it is in this context that I'm kind. Of embarking on my book.
So let me talk about the model that they have and how, um, we proposed to go ahead in my book.
So all of them, uh, use the quantum mystic models in a sense that you have a principal who has a contract with the agent.
So in this case, uh, the citizens have, in some sense, uh, an informal contract, a social contract, if you might want to call it, with the government.
But you cannot observe all the actions of the officials or, let's say, the politicians and so on,
thanks to which, uh, the principals in question cannot enforce the contract.
So which is very few, uh, bring in a measure of transparency, which is that you, uh, bring in these monitoring mechanisms.
Your ability to enforce the contract kind of becomes better. So that's the model with which they go.
So they want to create monitoring mechanisms for citizens to be able to, uh, view the, uh, actions of politicians or bureaucrats.
Um, so here you basically have a 1 to 1 relationship between the principal and the agent,
um, which maps in this case, let's say, uh, between citizen and government.
So the model, um, that you have here of transparency is that you get public record and send it to citizens, but citizens are seen as atomised people.
So you send information to people on a very, very independent manner.
And it's a really a choice theoretic, uh, issue here for the citizens that based on the information you get, you, uh, make your choice.
Let's, uh, let it be a voting choice or something. And it also assumes that citizens will be able to act on the information that you have.
So, uh, Jeremy Weinstein, um, in fairly naturally would assume that if you have,
let's say, better information about how your politicians perform in office,
you will be able to vote, um, according to the information that you have, which is all great.
But for most citizens, a government is a massive, massive, massive entity.
And a lot of us actually feel fairly powerless, uh, in dealing with the bureaucracy of the government in general.
So the assumption that citizens can act in a very seamless manner using the information that you get, uh, is flawed.
Um, and that's something that needs to be taken into account in building a transparency intervention.
So one of the things that you're trying to do is that the model of, uh, government.
But I mean, I'm sorry, sending public records to atomised individuals, um,
is something that I'm trying to challenge a little bit or at least work upon by bringing an element of activism into it.
So, um, in all the areas that I work in, instead of getting public records and sending it to citizens by, uh, practically drafting the information,
we work with activists in each of these areas who may be able to mobilise and do the things that are required in order to confront,
uh, convert the information into action. Um, along with that, I also tend to see, um, um, citizens not just as activist individuals,
but as a community in places where citizens are better organised, in places where they are able to act collectively.
The ability for information to translate into action is a little bit higher.
It's a fairly commonsensical it's a fairly simple thing to say,
but if you think about information interventions that are often created, it's really targeting towards individuals.
So is there a difference between creating, um, an information intervention for a community versus an individual?
I'll come into some of those, um, challenges, um, as I go along.
So what we have done is to change the model where we say that, uh, we want to get a public records and pass it on to,
um, a community, but doing it, um, in a way that we can help the activists that we work with to build a community.
I'll give you a quick example. Oh, one of the things that we've done is to create, uh, information broadcasting mechanism where any time,
let's say, a person gets benched, another person is given foodgrains.
Or if a truck reaches a village with food grains, we call people and let them know,
okay, according to our records, a truck getting so much grains has reached your village.
This should be adequate to give you, uh, give all the beneficiaries of the public distribution system your one month quota.
So. Which means that when you go to your ration shop, at the ration shop, dealers say, I don't have enough grains to give everybody,
you know, that it's a, it's a like, um, but along with that, uh, initially that was my only focus.
So just to keep the activists informed. But what we also started doing is to tell the activists, suppose if you want to organise a meeting,
um, or if there is other kind of information that you want to pass along, use our system.
We have a lot of phone numbers that we collected from you use our system to make announcements.
This to my surprise, I mean, this wasn't something that I anticipated in the first place.
This is has been the most favourite feature that the activists have been using.
And of course, everybody likes to listen to your own voice being broadcast to hundreds of people.
But in addition, what we realised is that it's such a powerful tool for mobilisation.
To give you an example, one of my activist, uh, partners, um, has a lot of.
Bananas, or these gatherings of protest gatherings.
The normal way in which they work is that they have a bunch of volunteers.
They will contact each of the volunteers who will in turn go and, um, talk to people.
Um, tell them that there's going to be one such gathering and then ask the people to come.
Now the volunteers tend to be from the same community, so they don't have the same kind of authority as,
let's say, the activist, uh, himself or herself might. And it also takes a lot of time and effort to do this.
So on one occasion when they had to organise that, that relatively quickly, he just used, uh,
used the system that we have to blast the call to, uh, a few thousand of the, uh, community that they are in touch with.
And they ended up getting twice the number of people turning up for the turnout than they would using the normal process.
Um, some of my, uh, partners have been using it very regularly to inform people.
So every time they would meet a government official, they would make a call and say, we met an official.
This is what exactly happened. Or if there's a protest in a different village, they would say, this is what happened in this village.
Or if there's a nice thing happening in a particular village, they'll say, this program was implemented beautifully in a different village,
and it has kind of created a mechanism for community building in a much, much more, uh, sustained and a relatively costless manner.
And a couple of my partners are, uh, people who started the work very, very recently.
So it's easier for me to see the impact of this mechanism with them than with an established organisation.
So in that sense, um,
disseminating public records and community building happened together in this particular process and enabling that has made a world of difference,
both for the uptake of the system by the activist partners, but also in, um,
creating a semblance of possibility that the issues that we are talking about will get addressed.
Now, along with transparency, we also realised that, um, um, I mean, all the partners told us that don't stop sending information.
We need to do something about the grievances. So we started doing very small things like collecting, um, feedback.
Um, based on the calls. Um, this is kind of, um, has an interesting implication because suppose if you, let's say,
create an idea of mechanism, um, let me pause by saying that I work in rural areas.
I work only with feature phones. I don't work with smartphones, I don't work with the internet.
So, um, for any complaint that you might want to submit to the government, you need to put a lot of details.
And so you need to say who is the complaint about? What is the program that you're talking about within the program?
Which month does your complaint pertain to? Uh, what is the specific project?
Which village are you talking about? And then you have to address it to the right official and whatnot.
So creating a cogent complaint that actually people can act upon is not a simple thing.
So if you were to create an IVR mechanism in which you ask people to feed all this data in,
it'll be practically impossible as a technical, uh, technically mediated mechanism to do that.
But suppose if I send a piece of information where I say,
according to the records in this particular project, you left two months back for which you had paid ₹300.
Can you confirm if you got that money?
And I already know who I am calling, uh, because I have their phone number and I have that identity number, the particular job identity number.
So I know who I'm calling, which village they belong to, which market is it pertains to, and I have all of that information.
So all they have to do is to press 1 or 2 at the end of it in order to give me a very cogent, consistent reply.
So grievance forwarding is something that we've added along with the transparency intervention.
And just adding that makes a huge difference to the whole project.
Now this as well, we had to tweak in many, of many ways in each area that we work in,
in certain places, we know that the bureaucracy is very, very proactive.
And they are um, um, uh, and for example, in Andhra Pradesh, which is an area that you work in, in the Employment Guarantee Act,
we knew that the the senior bureaucrats are extremely proactive, and they have also created a grievance redressal mechanism online.
So taking this these complaints and passing it on to the online mechanism made sense for me,
because if the lower level officials did not address these grievances within two weeks,
uh, that information will go to a top level official as an underdressed grievance and the ticketing mechanisms that they have.
And that is in a different place. Um, the activist told us that if you do have, let's say, um, submit individual complaints,
there will be so much pressure on the complainant by local officials that they will be made to withdraw the complaint.
And you'll see in lots of cases, complaints, getting close, saying that this complaint was false,
or that suppose if you make a complaint saying that the grain that I got from the public distribution system was of a poor quality,
the inspector who goes to verify the complaint will say, show me the grain, and if you don't have the grain anymore,
and because this person comes two months later, then they'll say this complaint has no basis.
It's annoying how to document the complaint and withstanding local pressures are also critical.
So the partner there told us that, uh, instead of submitting individual complaints,
let's wait till we get at least ten complaints from a particular village, because then people will be able to resist pressure better.
An individual will be able to. And instead of giving each complaint separately to the administration, we will collect them.
The activist will work with the community to prepare them, documented in ways that are,
um, compatible, and then give a collective complaint and follow up along with them.
So in that sense, um, in each place we realise that we have to strategize depending on the local context,
in order to follow up on the grievances that arise through the transparency mechanism.
And putting the two together, or at least conceiving the two together, can make a huge difference to the impact that a project might have.
And finally, we also realise that, um, along with information dissemination via mobile phone,
it makes a lot of difference, often to have print outs in certain cases.
Now one of my partners, for example, has what I mean, uh, social workers who cover ten villages.
Um, each know it's easy for me to send, um, uh,
each person's entitlement or the arrival of a truck to a village to all the people in that particular village.
But sending all that information via voice calls to this to the social worker will be completely meaningless.
So the moment we give them a printout saying this is what is happening in these villages,
or when we highlight certain problems that are happening in each place, it becomes a lot easier for them to navigate with.
So in that sense, um, having online plus offline communication, um, partly to bridge the gap with people that we are not able to reach,
but partly to present information in a different way, um, to people who may need it also started making a difference,
um, in how our partners have been perceiving the project so far.
So we started moving away from this very individual centred information dissemination mechanism to one that is focussed on the community,
um, and enabling activists to communicate with the community,
um, in order to build the community in some sense also became fairly important for the process, uh, creating grievances and offline mechanisms.
So those were some of the initial tweaks that we did, but then we ran into other problems as we went along.
Now it's easy to on in public records, um, in the Employment Guarantee Act alone,
if you go to the website, you will find that there are 220 plus reports.
Now each of these reports presents a different information, all of which is meaningful.
So one of the early exercises we did was to go to villages where we would ask people, okay,
would you would it be useful for you to know when the wages have been sent to your bank account?
Would it be useful if we sent this particular information and whatnot?
So what we realised in the process is that people had different problems in different areas.
And so it raised the question for us as to what is it that we need to make transparent.
It's a question that surprisingly, nobody really asks in the, um, in the technology for transparency community,
because a lot of this effort is really to get existing datasets and to visualise them in easy to consume ways.
So for us, it became really critical to ask what it is that you want to make transparent and the different strategies that we are following.
I can kind of communicate that. By I mean we can summarise it by the acronym Shuo, which I'll get to in a second.
So the first that we realised is that, um, we have to focus on the ease of understanding messages, but there are a lot of cases.
But even though information is there, it's so incredibly complicated or it's so incredibly nuanced that sending that,
especially via a voice call or SMS, is practically impossible.
That does act as a filtering mechanism.
Maybe we will come up with the easier way of delivering these messages in the future, but ease of understanding for us is critical.
So the information has to be short, self-contained, so that we don't say, uh, we don't, uh,
refer to something in the message and say, refer to something else because it's a voice call or an SMS.
So we don't have to qualify or give explanations. And then we also want to repeat what we said in every message.
Now, if you're thinking about a voice call that people can actually listen to and
make sense of doing it for more than a minute and a half doesn't make sense.
So it has to be short, self-contained, relatively simple, uh, elemental messages that you can actually send.
So along with ease. The second, um, thing that became really critical for us is how valuable is the message?
To give you an example.
Uh, in the works program, uh, after you work in a project, you're supposed to be paid within 15 days in some parts of, uh, in some areas,
we we work a new form of corruption has come up where the payment agencies will take will get the money that is sent to them.
These are intermediary agent private agencies that the government makes payments through,
and they send it out on interest because interest rates in rural India. Atrocious.
I mean, you can get, uh, 20 to 30% in a month.
So they would send it out on interest for a month or two. But for a poor labourer and a pensioner, this is pure torture.
If you don't get your money on time and then you get you pay the money later.
So here have people found it very valuable to know that the money has arrived in their bank account,
because the contract with the agency is that you have to pay it within four days,
so they can immediately track the, I mean, and they can actually go and talk to the agency.
Didn't say, now give me the money.
Whereas in some other places they said, look, I know I work and within 15 days I get my money, which is the duration.
So if you send me this information and when the money reach the bank account, it doesn't make any difference for me.
So, um, sending the right message is fairly critical.
Now, if you think about a lot of transference interventions, they're often based on some centralised person sitting in value.
I mean, creating values for messages saying these are important messages, let me disseminate them.
But how do you identify which message is useful in which context?
Because the local problems are so varied. So that has important design consequence for transparency interventions.
So which I'll talk to in a bit.
But even that needs to be kind of qualified because there are places where people would say that, uh, yes, this information is useful for us,
but I can't do anything about it because if I take this issue of I'd be beaten up in that kind of a scenario,
even if it's a valuable information, it's not something that you can really act upon.
So what we've kind of decided is that, um, one the information that we send needs to be relevant to a particular problem that people have.
And so the word that we use is kind of Actionability is the information that you send actionable.
A heuristic for this is that, um,
suppose if you send information saying that so many million dollars has been allocated in the national budget for, let's say,
building roads, you, the most that you can do with this information is to say,
okay, more money needs to go into roads and less money needs to go into roads. You can't verify it.
Whereas if we send an information saying so much money has been allocated for building a road in your village,
you can monitor and say, this road was built in my village or not, or even going down.
If you say that if a particular person was paid, um, so much money, then it is something they can immediately verify.
So information becomes more and more actionable when you go from macro issues like policies and budgets and so on to relatively micro issues,
um, including payments that are made to individuals, project implemented in the villages, resources allocated in villages, or how to information,
how to access this particular program, how to file a complaint, who to talk to for this, etc.
So a lot of that focus has shifted in terms of the micro level, partly because it is actionable.
And we um, as I said, information should be it should be relevant to a current problem that people face,
but it should also be something that people feel that they can act upon and resolve.
And the only way for us to know that is by having some kind of a local feedback.
Without that, there's nowhere on earth will be able to find out if it is a problem that people know that they can tackle,
given the current level of organisation, etc. So very often you might have, let's say,
a very enterprising bureaucrat in the locality who's so responsive that you feel that you can act on this particular information.
Um, or you may be in a place where, um, the senior bureaucrat rather than the local bureaucrat is much more capable of acting.
So in that sense, having a sense of organisation, having a sense of, um, the particular social context, um, but most importantly, um, the,
the level of unity that, uh, the community has,
all of these things have implications for your transparency, intervention to, um, translate into action.
So, like I said, build a building. Unity has been fairly important for us.
But equally, building on a community building on an existing community has been a strategy that we've been using.
And communities that are organised typically do a lot of different things.
They build alliances with, uh, I mean, different people in the administration or otherwise.
They have different kinds of skillsets. Um, and they bring a different kinds of people who all act as resources for action.
So this view of, um, transparency working in a kind of a collective action framework, if you think of it,
think of it as a social movement theorist rather than an economist who thinks about, um, information changing individual choices.
It seems to be a lot more powerful way of building, um, uh, uh, an intervention that has a chance to work.
So in essence, what we are saying is that if you have to build, um, uh,
an intervention that has a chance of working, it should be based on local strategies, strategies of the community,
not just what problems they face, not just what problems they feel they can act upon,
but also on what alliances they have and what are some of the current priorities.
So that's kind of, um, a set of, um, heuristics that we've been kind of developing has been going on in this particular project.
So there's a very specific way in which we work is that in each of the areas that I work and the activist partner,
we work with them on a continuous basis to. So they let us know that these are the current problems that we have.
We then bring all the information that we can find on the website to say, Will any of this be of use to you?
They will identify the kind of information. Then we try and put it in the most useful or the most easy to understand manner.
Test it out with the people that we work with, and start disseminating that information consistently for at least a period of one year so that,
um, information that you send doesn't like the social audit.
It's not a one shot thing. It's something that happens on a continuous manner.
So we also collect feedback in the process and pass it on to the activists as well as the government,
depending on the local priorities and the local context and the allies that we have and whatnot.
So the, the schwa um acronym, in some sense, it's fairly simple.
It's very commonsensical, but it's yet very, very consequential.
So localising information, um, based on uh, local problems and organisation is very, very critical in the way I think about it.
And it's not something that a lot of transparency interventions can easily account for, at least as they exist today.
To give you an example, the Government of India today has created a committee to examine how, uh, instead of just putting information online,
whether they can collect people's phone numbers, the beneficiaries phone numbers, and send information to them.
So the project that we have is that just this system of blasting information to
all the beneficiaries of welfare programs is not really going to take us too far.
So how do we localise? How do we contextualise, how do we build it upon a community, etc.?
It requires a lot of, um, thinking, a lot of design thinking, so that such policies that have great potential.
Um, do not lose out in a way that Weinstein, Grossmann and others found out.
So the strategies of all of his partners over the last two years keep changing constantly.
That is, if you look at a lot of our technology for transparency interventions,
it takes such a lot of time for us to take a data set and clean it up and to visualise it that we want it to be a long standing thing.
So the information interventions have to be really dynamic.
The messages should keep changing. So how do you build a dynamic system is another thing that we've been kind of contending with.
Um, the least that I want to finish with is that there's a lot of focus today on data sets.
You know, we want to open up data sets, and we want to get whatever data sets.
We can connect them to each other and to visualise them. Yes, that will be great.
But I feel like without doing all the attendant work, which requires localisation and prioritisation,
any information system that we create is unlikely to be successful,
especially if we want to focus on rural areas and on uh,
users would be having basic feature phones and like asking a person to go to a website and select from 220 different reports.
When you want an information dissemination mechanism through voice or items, you are very limited in the kind of information that you're dealing with.
So a lot more needs to happen than just putting information online.
We need to think about organisation. We need to think about building communities.
We need to think about building alliances and a lot else for transparency to do Park.
So I'll stop here and then hope to hear your questions and suggestions around it.
Thank you. Thank you. Let me turn this monitor off so I can take notes without you seeing what I'm thinking about you.
So it will take up to about 20 minutes or so for, um, questions like, would you like to take a few at a time?
Um, any help you want? So. So maybe we could take 2 or 3 at a time.
Um, there are any comments or questions? I see Benson for the first one.
Yeah. Um, so when you have the list of naysayers saying that, you know, opening up information, being transparent doesn't actually have real effect.
Um, I didn't read them, but it strikes me as that's quite obvious.
You know, of course, if the government opens up for data, I'm not going to look at all the data.
But, um, the what it may do is allow people like you and lots of other organisations to take that information and make it,
uh, valuable, and certainly has that check checked. What's the effect of the tiny amount of people,
the tiny fraction of the population that actually uses that information and then make something valuable out of it as they're being tested,
or if they, the naysayers, talks about that.
So what these three authors did was to take, um, some information that a lot of groups believe would be useful.
Um, they did the job of the info military curated, the information,
created visually appealing um cards, even organise meetings, um, all over the country.
Uh, explaining the performance, let's say of MP's or another case.
It was explaining the educational achievement of the children,
etc. etc. these were all very careful interventions, very careful interventions, very thoughtful interventions.
Uh, but they had taken into account, uh, and they just didn't, uh, look at what data sets are getting used.
They worked on very concrete information after a lot of homework.
Um, so the problem that I see with their work is that they thought about information acting in a very atomistic sense.
Plus, the information was prioritised centrally. In some sense, it was not dynamic.
The scorecards were prepared with a lot of work, but the score was static.
They didn't, um, particularly respond to the demands that local communities were making.
So, um, did communities want to know what foreign policy issues these guys commented on?
Probably not. Right.
And that's this is where I feel like even though all of these, uh, projects were based on very carefully curated, um, um, um, transparency mechanisms,
uh, they did not act on a lot of other things that, uh, I'm trying to do in this project, partly in response to their concerns.
Quick question. You do you think that you've proven them wrong with what you do?
Um, I don't know. I don't know the impact of my project.
Um, so we are still in early stages, but I know that if I were to just blast information to citizens, it will not succeed that much I know for sure.
Um, so. So, like I said, this is a work in progress. These are things that I'm struggling with.
So, yeah, I have a couple of questions. One long and one short that, um,
I'm really interested in the approach that the right information campaign in
India to to work with Aruna Roy was here and here ago and she made the point.
It's very similar to yours when you say, well, it's not enough. Digital information is not enough.
We need other kind of information, she said. We almost won our campaign and people.
We're coming in saying we can put everything online. As Betty was saying.
And we said, that's not enough. We have to go to the village level and put on a board written,
handwritten language that can be spoken and understood by the people, the relevant information.
At that point, people are in power.
And even if you're part of deliberation, technology, agenda and so forth, you have a very nuanced approach saying this is not enough.
But in developed and in developing country, there is kind of a digital complacency approach.
A lot of governments are saying information is out there.
So we have done our job.
But what is specific of India is they have to find in other places that sort of forces both government and activists to make the next step,
because you're never satisfied that independently from what is the stand that you're taking and I haven't find elsewhere,
maybe in the broader president, find it in in other countries I haven't personally.
So this is, this is this is the first question and uh, and I can I will just focus on this one and maybe that's not it.
So should I be for one more question, I forgot to make sense before I answered Benson.
I have two questions. The first is methodological. How do you choose the number of agents that you have in each and each village?
Do you take the people that you have their phone numbers and text all of them,
or do you choose people that are strategically located within the community?
And the second question is that I saw what you did with simplifying the information, saying that we don't care about the budget, the overall budget.
This is the amount of money allocated to your road.
But my question is kind of critical in the sense that if you simplify that information,
don't you perpetuate the kind of information poverty in the sense that now they know how much has been allocated to the specific road,
but they have no idea how much from the budget it is, and they can't even compare in the sense that,
okay, this is what we have, this is what we're going to make do. So.
Just talk with your question.
I mean, I don't want to trivialise the work that has happened and right information and relate allied movements around the world.
So the very fact that 100 countries today have a right to information law is because people have been acting on it.
And, uh, over a period of time, I think the disconnect is between people who focus on right information online in terms of creating data sets.
Um, but there's a much wider right information community everywhere.
I mean, investigative journalists, for example, uh,
in different parts of the world often rely very heavily on access to information through right information, FOIA or whatever that is called.
And I do see that there's a lot of sophisticated use of the law, per se.
Uh, but the, uh, does the sophistication extend to using the law, uh, creatively when it comes to putting information online?
I think there's a long way to go for that. Um, data driven journalism is one thing that seeks to do this in a clever way.
Um, but when it comes to interfaces that are created for citizens,
I think we have a long way to go in, um, doing things that are much more meaningful.
But that's, I think, a reflection of the fact that all of us are contending with this new beast.
Um, but I do think that, uh, India is definitely not in isolation in terms of, um, thinking about clever ways of using information.
The difference, if any, um, is that among the people that I have interacted with in this community,
there's a lot more focus on rural areas and working with communities that often don't have access to information by themselves.
And so in that, I think maybe it's an accident that, uh, but I, I have not I was based in a village when she started this book,
and then we discovered that it was a very powerful mechanism for doing things.
Uh, but yeah, I wouldn't want to make a blanket statement that that isn't so fascinating use of
that information in other places and on how many people we send information to,
etc. So as of now, um, we initially I started with, uh, um, heuristic that we'll try and collect at least 100 phone numbers from each village.
But it turns out that in certain programs it works reasonably well.
Um, like the public distribution system where, um,
as long as I can tell people that you have enough grains reaching your village to satisfy everybody's entitlement, it works well.
But when it comes to the Employment Guarantee Act, um, I need to send that information to each person who worked in each project there.
What ended up happening is that the amount of people that I could inform out of 100 in each village became very, very low.
So because people tend to work at different times, uh, not everybody does 100 days of work.
Very often I would have only 6 or 7 people to whom I can disseminate information among many, many who may have worked.
So now I'm trying to increase the base to at least one third of the, uh, beneficiaries of each program.
Um, but the process of collecting phone numbers is very, very difficult, and numbers keep changing.
So it's a lot of homework that you need to do. There is a different reason as to why I do not want to blast information to everyone,
which is that I want this to be a tool that is used by activist organisations who use right information.
So which means that my system will be effective only if it is low cost.
So any system that blasts information is not going to be effective. Now, uh, a hopeful stage, but I want to get to is that, um,
you create an information dissemination mechanism where we randomly send information to a small number of people, say, in each habitation.
So people have some basic information and of course, people talk to each other, especially in rural context.
And then for the rest, we have an incoming mechanism with all they have to do is to dial a particular number,
and they can listen to that number pertaining to them, information pertaining to them if they want to.
So that way the cost of information is shared.
Now this is actually really interesting because the cost of hosting data, um, and the cost of incoming phone calls is very negligible.
There are a lot of activist organisations may be able to use this, um,
because the predominant cost in this kind of a mechanism is the cost of the call.
If we can distribute the information, or rather, that cost sharing by asking people to call into the system,
um, um, it creates a great avenue of consistent transparency.
And people will only call if they feel like it's a problem. Right?
So it's a way of automatically also detecting who has problem instead of blasting information to everyone.
So but we are not quite there because I want to spend enough time in broadcasting
information without people having to call us until we find out what it is that,
uh, people find useful and how to deliver that, and so on.
Once we get there, I'm really hopeful of creating these mechanisms where different activists will be able to host their own information,
um, that others can call into. Right.
Two questions. One was getting off from net, which was, uh, maybe gone from leading up methodology.
Uh, I was just wondering about the scope of it. You have done it in four states, but then how do you, uh, plan to scale it up?
If we have 1.2 billion people in 70% of them live in more conditions?
Do we have enough activists in all the regions to get the information that's relevant to all these people?
And the second question I had, which was more of interest to me, is, uh, you're talking about an effective transparency intervention system.
So you were basing it off of, uh, context and localisation of the context.
But, uh,
what is your impression of the government's initiative into this when they bring out the UAD project and there's no budgetary constraints of that?
So what are your impressions of that system, which is trying to do very much the same thing.
That's what you're trying to do. Yeah. You it doesn't do that.
By the way, you said only to uh, record identify the correct individual, which is a unique identity project,
which is the biometric, uh, uh, identification of every citizen that the government of India is trying to do.
That's what he's referring to. My UAD and a transparency intervention like this will not work until the government actually puts data online.
Right. To that extent, um, it is critical for, um, e-governance mechanisms to be there so that, um,
every transaction gets recorded in the first place digitally and that it is made available proactively online,
preferably in open data formats and so on.
So there has been a lot of effort around the world, especially through the open data movement, to make governments do that.
Um, what I'm saying is that it doesn't we shouldn't stop there.
We should go one step extra to make sure that the mass of information that gets put online gets channelled by Info Ministries.
Um, based on all the criteria that we discussed, as far as the scale of it is concerned,
one thing that I am fairly certain of is that at least in a context like India, it does have a very vibrant civil society that is very widely spread.
So if we create mechanisms where activists can very easily extend it to their local areas, um, we'll be able to scale it up fairly substantially,
especially if we predominant keep on incoming phone calls, uh,
because then they don't have to bear enormous cost in, you know, hosting this kind of a system.
So the question that I would ask is, yes, even this will be limited, right?
Obviously even this is not going to reach, let's say, even the majority of the population.
So the question that I would want to ask is, yes, we won't have an information intervention that reaches the majority,
but would it make sense for us to acknowledge that just by sending information to those who are,
um, in some sense unorganised, um, or not organised,
or who don't have an ability to respond to this information, should we just tell blast information to them?
So would that be of value? It's a it's a question that we need to ask.
And I think there are interesting ways of, um, getting the government to disseminate information, um,
along with activists, even without necessarily setting of activists, um, even without actively collaborating with them.
So one, uh, design that I'm thinking of now, I'm not sure if I could work on it,
would be to consider 220 reports that I talked about an Employment Guarantee Act.
Let's say that there are 6 or 7 reports that are very critical at the grassroots, um,
in a sense that it's micro information, it's easily verifiable, etc., etc. instead of putting,
let's say, the six or even 20 in 1, um,
have phone list so that people will have to call and go through an IVR mechanism to identify the right information.
Let's say you create 20 different phone numbers, or let's say you create even five phone numbers.
Each contains four reports.
Now one activist in a particular area can just distribute a pamphlet to people if that particular problem is very prevalent.
Saying that, call this particular number to get that information so that it I think clever ways
that we may be able to navigate where you create an information ecosystem that,
uh, typically non-tech savvy activist doesn't have to work on, but they will still be able to customise information according to local priorities.
Um, it's something that I think needs a lot of thinking and experimenting with.
But in my mind, without doing that, uh, creating, um, universal transparency mechanisms,
especially using mobile phones is not going to take us too far.
Um, so I just wanted to ask you about the kind of politics, because these are an intensely kind of political activity, you know?
So can you tell me about the kind of communities that and, I mean, when you talk about the community,
who are you acting in kind of these local villages and what implication to that have around kind of different politics?
So I, I don't, um, choose the community that we work with, um, sitting at Stanford and trying to do this work.
I'm way too far remote to do anything like that. What I do instead is, um, go back to my activist roots and identify the set of, uh,
people that I think have had, uh, substantial impact over the last ten, 15 years that I've known them.
And a couple of young activists who seem to be really, really promising.
Um, so, um, the dynamics within, um, I don't really get into that question at all in terms of their priorities, their method of acting, etc.
I don't really get into that. Um, which is, um, so I should acknowledge that there's that a potential limitations there.
Right.
So depending on who they choose to work with, maybe it's cast as organisation, like maybe they have, um, uh, they have of exclusions and whatnot.
It is something that I acknowledge. Um, and it's something that I'm happy to look at.
Um, and I don't um, there have been times when one of the so in, in each place that I work,
I have one, um, team member today who actually, uh, is embedded with the NGO that I work with.
Um, in some cases, they have come back to me with feedback saying, look, uh, the way in which this particular group operates, um, needs change.
Can you go back to the leader and tell them that, you know, you need to do these things differently?
And I, uh, put my foot down on it because it's not my station to go and tell activists who
live and work in that area for decades as to how they should change their work.
Um, but it it has its inherent limitations, which I'm happy to acknowledge.
I mean, just to follow up on that, I mean, there's, um, like a lot of using Indian moments around these kind of anti-corruption party and things.
So do you find yourself being connected with a sense of politics, which then kind of could cause issues, or is that not so as of now?
It just happened so that, uh, in different states that I work are ruled by different parties.
So I have been in conversation with, um, I don't I'm not in conversation with a political party directly.
I'm in conversation with senior bureaucrats, uh, who obviously work very closely with chief ministers.
Um, the, the, um, criteria that I have is that in general, um,
this much data is never put online unless the chief minister is makes this program a political priority or the bureaucrats there are really proactive.
So that is a selection bias, um, in how I operate at this point.
Um, and I think that it's a productive way of getting, um, on this kind of project at this point because without,
um, responsive bureaucracy, uh, at least a project like this is not likely to succeed.
Um, so which is again, to say that, uh, what transparency mechanism?
I mean, there are lots of different ways of doing things that are lots of different ways of making a government to be responsive.
And I don't want to, uh, name the digital transparency, um, uh, thing with the same hammer that I have in every single place.
So I want to acknowledge that it won't work. And probably most of the pieces encountered in local opposition.
Um, so far, um, I mean, again, the project is fairly young because of the fact that I work through,
um, responsive bureaucrats and because I work with people who are very, very organised.
Um, there hasn't been any local resistance that we have, uh, confronted, um, yet.
But then if the project does become, um, viable and if it really creates a challenge, that's something we might see.
But in fact, the paradoxical thing that we saw is that a lot of, um,
field level workers have started approaching us to disseminate certain types of information.
What often ends up happening is that a field level worker who lives in the same village would often go to people and tell them, this is the rule.
That is, they'll say, you're telling me this is a role because you don't want to give me this benefit?
Um, so they have started approaching us and saying, look, the system that information goes through, your mechanism has more credibility with people.
So can you please still inform people of this rule so that it takes burden off us?
So that is that was completely unexpected. Um, but so there are areas, I think, where it will work well with local officials,
but I'm sure there are areas where we have conflicts as we go along.
But it is a conflict that I expect the partner to manage because the, uh,
strategy and issues and everything are driven by them and they do it in their natural course of operating.
Um, I'd like to ask you about the root cause of the problem or the root problem, which is, uh, corruption itself.
Um, I was recently told by, um, an academic at a New Delhi who was describing to me the corruption is something that
really trickled down in the sense that it was pervasive in some aspects of the culture,
in the sense that even people who were meant to deliver services at the most basic local level just have it as part of just ingrained.
Just because it's happening high on up and they might not be getting their due.
Um, and they just sort of put a little bit money aside for themselves.
And so I'm just wondering if there's something there as far as informing or having sort of an awareness raising
or even informing workers that at a sort of most basic local level of what their wages are supposed to be,
of what their project is meant to look like.
So I don't know if you've targeted them as opposed to just also the citizens in the community who are meant to benefit from the services.
And so the um, because, again, I the kind of programs that I have selected to work on are programs that are very,
very pervasive in a sense that they are implemented in practically every single village across the country.
And, uh, they reach a very large proportion of people, uh, especially the poor in the country,
or at least, uh, they're supposed to reach a very large proportion of them.
So to that extent, as long as the information reaches this particular, um, very substantial group, I think we are reasonably fine.
What has happened? Um, this is not by design that I mean, but for some of my activist partners have started adding the phone numbers of officials.
Um, so that have been they want to, um, they want to inform them as well as local notables and whatnot, as a part of the system.
Um, so in that sense, it's kind of happening organically to a certain extent.
But, um, that's not my main target group in some sense.
But there's a different, um, answer to, um, your earlier, the earlier part of your question as well, which is that,
um, while corruption is pervasive, um, it is not uniform everywhere, and it is a changing phenomenon.
There are states where public services tend to work remarkably well.
Um, if that's a particular issue that you want to discuss more deeply on the practical.
Precisely what my current book is on, which is to look at, uh, one particular state.
The public services are delivered remarkably well.
And I look at what is the, uh, what are the dynamics that led to this particular political commitment?
And if you're interested in giving a talk, um, within Oxford again, day after tomorrow on the same subject, I'd be happy to send you the location.
So the the key lesson in some sense is that where people are organised and when people are able to demand their rights effectively,
the level of corruption does change.
So what I'm hoping to do is to find strategies to enable that, in part by by supplementing current efforts with digital technology.
I think about you. You can't be honest with what I thought I was going to go on.
But nonetheless, I wondered, how far did your suits design lead you?
Space to actually assess the impact on the quality of citizenship or practical citizenship in these environments?
Um, so I'm, uh. So what I'm not trying to do is to look at the quality of citizenship, because there is a big selection bias and, uh, how, I mean,
who I work with in itself, what I'm trying to do is to see whether my own intervention, um, can have an impact on the effectiveness of organisations.
So one of the things that I'm trying to do is, uh, in areas where I work in a fairly substantial number of villages and trying to, um,
randomly select villages within which the activists already have a presence, um,
and then have this intervention for a year or two and see whether there is a difference in how far these programs work.
Well, in these villages. Uh, it has interesting methodological, um, problems, partly because we send information based on local problems,
which means that there is an endogeneity in the intervention directly.
Um, the second element that I do not want to compromise on is that if you look at a lot of, um, I mean,
our cities in general tend to be effective if your intervention is very, very, very standardised.
Now, as far as I'm concerned, you cannot standardise and, uh, transparency intervention because it has to respond to local concerns.
It has to respond to opportunities. It has to respond to context.
So I want my intervention to be able to vary over a period of time, depending on what the priorities are and what comes up.
Um, so I don't want to just blindly send exactly the same information to each place, which would have made it standardised.
So but still, despite that, what I can do will be the following.
Which is to say that, um, let's say there are 100 villages that I choose of them.
These 50 are controlled by. This is a level of corruption.
This is the timeliness with which payments are being made, etc. etc. in the other 50, I did have an intervention.
I can document the intervention accurately because I know every message that goes out.
I know how many people pick up the phone, I know how long they listen to the message and whatnot.
And then I qualify with that by saying that in places where I have an intervention, this is the difference in the result.
But I don't want to associate the metric by saying that seven phone calls leads to a point 5% reduction in corruption.
It'll still, I think, help us to make, uh, qualified, measured yet a tentative assessment.
I think we have time for about one more question, and I have seen Ben with his hand up,
but is there anyone who hasn't asked the question who has a burning question before we give Ben's final opportunity?
And, yeah, this is, um, what we talked about earlier, as you're looking at, um,
maybe could you give a few minutes presentation of deliberation to criticism?
Because I'm seeing some people here, um, for instance, and what that entails.
So, I mean, it's, um, little sister to Oxford Internet Institute, uh, in some sense.
Uh, so basically it was started by, um, a couple of political scientists and a computer scientist,
partly because the political scientist who or one of them,
Larry Diamond, who's teaches democracy, um, increasingly started having students who kept asking him, what about Facebook?
What about Vietnam, what about this, etc., that he didn't have answers to?
So he paired up with, uh, computer scientist called Terry Winograd, who is also the founder of the design school at Stanford University.
Um, so initially, um, it was really a platform for us to learn.
So we have a seminar series where, um, I mean, in two quarters, um,
each year they've been inviting people to first learn our sense as to what's going on.
And given the fact that, uh, we have two political scientists in the group,
one of the early focus of the program has been on, uh, the impact of, um, digital technologies in international relations.
So particularly on how authoritarian regimes have been using digital technology.
So we've done some conferences around it, and there's a book that has come out of process, um,
since I joined the this is about four years back because my focus has been on transparency as an activist,
and that's probably the one thing that I kind of at least understand, but I don't really understand international relations at all.
So we've been doing a lot more work on, um,
in conversing with people who have been having the transparency initiatives to see what kind of initiatives people are taking up,
what are the limitations, um, what are the interesting innovations that are happening?
So we've done several conferences in India as well as in the US.
Um, the most interesting initiative that has come out of that is, uh,
out of this process is a massive open online course that will start in May on the use of technology for transparency,
which is a consortium of organisations and scholars, uh, who will all talk about different ways in which technology shaping transparency practices.
I've been trying to recruit Mark to this today. Um, so David will talk about how to transmit technology.
Is being used to track political finances, elections, fighting corruption at the grassroots, etc. etc. um,
apart from having short lectures which will be a part of the course, uh, I'm also trying to solicit people who have projects,
either those who have ideas and want to build a tool which, um, Mark, among others,
I'm hoping will be able to tip in, or people who have tools and who want that to be adopted internationally.
So I'm trying to bring such live projects into the course, and we'll also be having, um, hackathons and other activities in my estimate,
I think at least 10 to 15 countries, because I'm partnering this with National Democratic Institute, which has a presence in about 80 countries.
Um, and we're also working with code for India, code for Pakistan, and a number of other hacker groups that have thousands of volunteers.
So I'm it's it's something that I'm really looking forward to because it will be very action oriented,
um, plus a very different model of teaching in some sense.
And I'm not even sure if I can call it teaching.
I have not understood if it's a conference or a course or a community building exercise, but it's it's it's own beast.
Um, so in case any of you are interested about that, please do talk to me and I can tell you more about what we have in on cards.
Um, so, like I said, uh, Patty, being one of the founders of design school,
we've also been organising and been offering a course called Designing Liberation Technologies,
where students go to Kenya, work with a set of NGOs that identify problems that they're working with.
They come back to Stanford, learn design thinking as a part of the course,
and then try to come up with, uh, phone based tools that could address some of these issues.
Uh, it has led to a few promising projects, one example being that a lot of people in the slums that they've worked in lose
documents constantly due to fire or flood or other kinds of natural disasters.
So she's creating a simple intervention of, um, scanning the documents and storing them in the cloud,
because when people have photocopies, they're able to get new copies of the documents relatively easily.
So in that sense, when we find a promising project,
we've been trying to offer seed funding to the students to go and actually implement it in reality as well.
So those have been some of the initiatives, but we are really hoping to grow as we go along,
because there's a lot of such work that happens across Stanford in practically every department imaginable.
So we're trying to form a community of all of us so we can actually collaborate with each other, but also showcase to the world a little bit better.
What action happens within Stanford? Great.
Thanks. Thanks for this great work that you're doing. And, uh, thank you guys for for coming to listen.
And please join me in thanking Vivek for.