‘My City My Responsibility – A Handbook for Active Citizenship’ is now live. Click here to download.
‘My City My Responsibility – A Handbook for Active Citizenship’ is now live. Click here to download.
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I Change My City

I Change My City (ICMyC), (www.ichangemycity.com) as the name suggests, is a platform for people to come together to change their city by taking action.

Through this hyper-local social change network, urban communities interact on varied civic issues, learn from each other and strive towards changing the city to make it a better place to live.

ICMyC aims to address three aspects in urban governance; Participation, Accountability and Transparency. The distinct feature of ICMyC is that it helps build a network of concerned people to address common challenges. It connects people on-line and prods them, by sharing information and success stories, to actively engage on civic issues. The multiplicity of various government departments and the paperwork involved acts as a deterrent for many individuals to connect with civic agencies. IChangeMycity.com tries to address this problem by being a seamless bridge between government and citizens.

Since its inception in Bangalore in 2012, ICMyC has helped in addressing problems like garbage disposal, poor road conditions, street safety and security related issues. ICMyC has also been instrumental in taking the city budget to people by providing information on how much funds have been allocated to Wards and Constituencies and how the same has been utilised.

I Change My City has the following initiatives under its umbrella.

  • Ichangemycity mobile and web application
  • Swachhata mobile and web application
  • Public Eye mobile application

Swachhata

Swachhata mobile and web application is part of a partnership with the Swachh Bharat Mission of the Ministry of Urban Development of the Government of India, wherein the Swachhata mobile app and the website, www.swachh.city is built and managed by Janaagraha for the Swachh Bharat Mission.

The Swachhata application is a fourth generation complaint redressal mobile and web platform. It is a quantum leap in how complaints and grievances are being redressed by Municipal Corporations in India. This solution is for all the 4041 towns and cities of India.

The Swachhata application fuses together a time-tested complaint redressal platform with the opportunity for citizens to work together on civic issues with community centric features for citizens to vote up on complaints, share them with other concerned citizens and comment on the work being done.

The application has more than 1.3 million downloads (June 2017) and is being used actively by more than  1000 cities and towns in India.

 As of June 2017, the website, IChangeMyCity.com (ICMyC) has 6, 07,931 users and has more than 2,44,928 complaints on the site. Around 1,74,057 of these complaints have been resolved by connecting the complaints to various government agencies.

ICMyC website is currently (2017) in three cities. Having tested its grounds, and with positive outcomes, ICMyC aims to reach

IChangeMycity.com is the winner of the prestigious Google Global Impact Award- India 2013.

Public Eye

The Public Eye feature of ICMyC is a traffic violation reporting mobile application; an unique initiative run in collaboration with the Bengaluru Traffic Police. The   mobile app allows for citizens to report the traffic violation and it is seamlessly sent to the dashboard of the traffic police, which fines the erring drivers. More than 80,000 people have downloaded the mobile application and lakhs of rupees have been collected as fines from errant drivers.

Background for ICMYC             

Urban India suffers from a massive disconnect between citizens and local government, where even a small task, such as finding information to contact your local civic agency, becomes an ordeal. This is further complicated because of fragmentation between urban bodies and departments, and fundamentally, the lack of formal avenues for citizens to take part in local governance.

ICMYC was launched on 22nd July, 2012 to be the platform to connect citizens to each other, and their civic agencies and to act as a single point interaction space related to governance and infrastructure of the city.

The online team invested three years building the ICMyC platform- a complex undertaking to produce maps from an astonishing 5000+ geo-locational data points, and the building of a multifaceted system by which complaints are sorted and forwarded to relevant Government Agencies for solutions.

Details of the features on ICMYC:

  1. Complaint Resolution Mechanism: Since its launch in 2012, 2,44,928 complaints has been posted on the ICMyC website. Of these, around 1,74,057 (June 2017) have been resolved. The Complaints Resolution follows a unique methodology wherein each complaint is mapped to the Ward and thus sent to the Civic Agency for it to be taken up by an Engineer who is in-charge of the area. ICMyC also ensures that the email address and mobile number of the Complainant is verified so that the Engineer and Citizen can be in touch and work together to resolve complaints.
  2. Number of Registered Users: Since its launch, over 6,07,931 users have registered on ICMyC from across the city of Bengaluru and Mumbai.
  3. Inclusive Data-driven Features:

Street Quality Score (SQS) |This initiative aims to deliver an objective measure of the quality of life experienced by citizens at the hyper-local level in Bengaluru. Over a period of six months, Janaagraha carried out a survey of the city’s infrastructure and services.

Budget Brief | www.ichangemycity.com/budget  This initiative explains the BBMP budget for the citizens of Bengaluru. It describes a ward’s share in detail and how much money is being budgeted by BBMP for the improvement of infrastructure in a ward.

Constituency connect | This is an online module in I Change My City to connect and bring together, the Elected Representatives, the citizens and the issues plaguing the wards and constituencies. This platform assists the elected representatives to view complete list of grievances in their constituency and forward complaints to respective agencies for resolution. The complaints can be filtered according to date, and the local representatives can communicate directly with the complainants. It also gives her/ him opportunity to understand her/ his constituency through spatial and non-spatial data, interact and engage with the constituency on a regular basis. For the citizens, it makes all the information available on public domain at one place.

  1. Using Maps; Making spatial data more relevant and contextual: ICMyC successfully negotiated the challenges of making spatial data more relevant and contextual and has made it available to all users.
  2. Unique Mobile Strategy: ICMyC over the last year has adopted a two-pronged mobile strategy and developed a Responsive Web Design. The site has been built to provide an optimal viewing experience – easy reading and navigation with minimum resizing, panning, and scrolling – across a wide range of devices (from mobile phones to desktop computer monitors).

Mobile Apps: Technology, as we know, is being used literally on the move. We have developed user-friendly mobile apps across various smartphone platforms- Android, iOS and Windows. This would allow users to post complaints about issues that affect them on the go.

  1. Social media presence: ICMYC is very active on social media platforms and has more than 2,26,435 likes on Facebook and has more than 3,377 followers on Twitter proving that citizens want to take action, they are posting the complaints, sharing them with their communities and are also bringing them on to the platform.
  2. Enhanced User Experience: ICMyC constantly reviews itself to provide better user experience. The site’s look and feel has undergone a revamp after considering inputs and feedback from users, data driven usability tests.