City Pulse

There are several challenges in our cities that can be solved only through civic learning (essentially the learning of civic sense) and civic participation at scale. Major challenges like traffic indiscipline, littering, not segregating garbage, open urination, not queuing up, defacing public assets, paying bribes, not paying taxes, not voting in elections and a general disrespect for the rule of law are all impossible for governments alone to solve. We need civic learning and civic participation at massive scale in our cities to surmount these challenges.

Civic learning needs to find its rightful place in our school curriculum. Imagine if we could take our schoolchildren to a civic picnic at the landfill, a walking tour of the municipality and the council, an exposure visit to the sewage treatment plant and an outing to the police station, and combine this with basic lessons in active citizenship? Similarly, formal platforms for civic participation in city neighbourhoods like area sabhas and ward committees and structured processes like participatory budgeting are necessary to build a sense of community among neighbours, instil trust between citizens and governments, and improve transparency and accountability in the functioning of municipalities and other civic agencies.

Imagine if we could get together as neighbours of a community along with civic officials and the elected representative, to vote on and prioritise the budgets for our neighbourhood every year, to track civic works in progress and discuss the grievances dashboard of our neighbourhood every month, and to discuss the five year ward development plan once in five years.

The personal leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Swachhata has meanwhile generated unprecedented political impulse albeit towards a more informal model of citizen participation. Schools, colleges, corporates, government offices, and citizen groups of different kinds are now animated by Swachhata related causes and volunteering for them. The time is ripe for creating a market for citizen volunteering in our cities, as the first step towards systematic civic learning and civic participation.

There are hundreds of civic causes that are unattended in our cities. Parks and playgrounds may require de-weeding. Public toilets may require cleaning or citizens may need awareness on open defecation. The public library may need help in rearranging its books. The orphanage may need help in taking children out on a festival day. The government school’s chemistry teacher may have proceeded on maternity leave without a replacement. The public community hall may need inventory records of its chairs and tables.

The municipality itself may need professional help in its finance department. A marketplace that can connect these causes to citizen volunteers and thereby create a market for citizen volunteering for civic causes in cities would be hugely transformative.

Firstly, volunteering would in itself be practical civic learning that exposes citizens to the realities of civic governance in India. It would nudge citizens to reflect more deeply on why things are the way they are when it comes to the municipality and our cities. It would also educate citizens on who in government is responsible for what aspect of governance, what challenges governments face and where exactly things are going wrong. Volunteering for the municipality or any other civic agency would therefore serve as a reality check that will dislodge cynicism and replace it with civic consciousness and civic responsibility.

Secondly, it will prepare citizens for more systematic civic participation in city neighbourhoods. First-hand exposure to challenges of service delivery and civic problem solving will change the way citizens think, from thinking only about outcomes and services much like consumers, to thinking about democratic processes and the rule of law like rights-and-obligations-bearing citizens.

Thirdly, volunteering for civic causes will hopefully build greater degrees of empathy among citizens. India’s cities are cruelly unequal. The propensity to purchase private services and exit the public system has created many unequal cities within our cities, with citizens going about their lives within their own physical and social enclaves. A better understanding of the lives and challenges of fellow citizens in cities could fundamentally alter our own demands from governments.

Lastly, in a tactical yet important way, citizen volunteering will enhance skills and capabilities of municipalities. Today, municipalities are hugely under resourced in terms of both number of staff and their skills. In our municipalities we have approximately 200 million adult citizens. If even 5% of this population, ie 10 million citizens spare just 2 hours out of 168 hours in a week (assuming 1 hour for local transport), ie just over 1% of their time, we have 20 million volunteer hours, equivalent to 5,00,000 full-time employees. Imagine the transformative scale and power of such shramdaan!

Record growth in mobile and data penetration, and wide reach of social media makes it possible to build a countrywide digital backbone for citizen volunteering in cities. Spatial mapping of civic volunteering opportunities to locate the nearest cause, matching of volunteers to causes based on predefined preferences, allocation of credits and volunteering leader-boards by individual/ family/ school/ college/ corporate, etc, before/ after pictures, family volunteering and civic picnics, a national market for skill-based volunteering with municipalities, etc can all be easily translated into action within just a few weeks.

It is an undeniable fact that our cities need to become better places to live and work. Even as governments have their own work cut out, largescale citizen volunteering in cities could be the pathway to get there.

This article first appeared on - The Times of India

Image Courtesy: Chad Crowe