Copyright thehindu
A newly launched online portal for Nanjangud City Municipal Council (CMC) has raised fresh hopes for redressal of citizens’ grievances by not only providing information and contact details of local elected representatives and Municipal employees, but also giving the residents options to scan QR codes displayed in each area to get in touch with the officials concerned. The digital initiative called ‘Civinc’, a portmanteau of the words ‘civic’ and ‘link’, which was incubated at Ashoka University, was launched by Nanjangud MLA Darshan Dhruvanarayan recently in the presence of the CMC President Srikanta and CMC official including its Commissioner Vijaya. Aishwarya Sunaad, a resident of Mysuru and an alumna of Ashoka University, who is also the head of Concept Development and Research for Civinc, told The Hindu that the portal ‘civinc.in’ seeks to replace the existing “opaque” grievance portals with “direct and transparent” connections between citizens and government functionaries. The citizens of Nanjangud can now scan ward-specific QR codes displayed in each area to know the details of municipal staff handling specific civic issues. Described as the “first-of-its-kind” digital initiative, Civink gives citizens options to register complaints under garbage and sanitation, street lights, road maintenance, water supply, underground drainage, voter ID, public safety, health and other issues. “Users do not need to download the app separately to raise their grievances. The platform also empowers users to contribute data or flag outdated information, and features a first-of-its-kind internal performance review for municipal employees, thus enabling greater civic participation and enhancing administrative accountability,” said a statement issued by Ashoka University. Mr Darshan Dhruvanarayan, who spearheaded the project, has been quoted in a press statement that “Nanjangud is proud to lead the way as the first non-metro city in the country to digitize its civic data. Giving citizens direct access to officials, who are responsible for essential services, makes governance more transparent, responsive and efficient”. Built through the process of co-production, Civinc address the challenges faces by non-metro cities with under-resourced technological infrastructure and limited manpower by partnering with local governments to host, review and maintain civic data at zero cost, the statement said. While Mr. Dhruvanarayan was responsible for the digitisation of the civic data, the Civinc portal was built wholly by students with end-to-end technology developed by Harsh Raj and Aditya Sinha from the National Institute of Technology, Jamshedpur, under the guidance of Dr. Debayan Gupta, assistant professor of Computer Science, Ashoka University. “With this scalable model, Civinc is now poised to expand across the country, helping more towns and cities improve governance and service delivery through technology-driven solutions,” the statement added.
