SHUDIFY

Changemaker: Srikar Gullapalli

To deal with inefficient and corrupt provision of public services by the government in India and the stagnation in the back-and-forth dialogue between the government and its citizens which allows all the market failures in the government to perpetually exist, Srikar Gullapalli and Bharadwaj Reddy decided to start <strong>Shudhify</strong>, a data-based, incentive-based, but also plain-fun, project in the Summer of 2011. The central conceit of the project is a datamap of efficiency &amp; corruption levels which is constructed after conducting location-based surveys of citizens at local government offices, pumping these surveys through algorithms, and then using GIS to put it all up district-wise on a map so we can differentiate each district by its level of efficiency and corruption. The trends we find in our data enable us to pinpoint various issues that exist across districts, and we will build coalitions with academia, NGOs, firms, etc to find a solution for these issues and then implement our citizen-sourced solution in one district, hence creating the impetus for the government to solve it in other districts. Also, when we want to bring publicity to certain troublesome trends in our data, we will be conducting large attention-grabbing “dares”, our own brand of performance activism in partnership with theater groups and youth groups in Bangalore. We are also crafting narratives of individual government services by following a couple of citizens trying to get those services from start to finish; and we are crafting the narratives of individual government offices after sitting in the office from morning to evening. This humanizes our quantitative data with a qualitative flourish. We have built partnerships with organizations such as the British Council (of course), World Bank Institute, Times of india, Paraspara Trust, Public Affairs Centre, Team CVoter, U4 etc. We are further working with youth groups, theatre groups, and a variety of media organizations. We have already been featured twice in the Times of India. In the summer of 2012, Shudhify is going to expand in all of these aspects with more data, more permanent collaborations, more media channels, and more engagement with both the government and the public.