Janaagraha-Brown Citizenship
Index (JBCI)
As India continues to urbanise, some critical questions on the landscape emerge:
- Are citizens able to invoke their rights or do ties between the political elite and citizens remain unwaveringly strong?
- Can effective citizenship, exercised by citizens through political and civic participation, lead to substantive improvements in people’s lives? Specifically, can it help improve the extent and quality of public service delivery (water, sanitation, electricity, transport)?
With these questions in mind, Janaagraha and Professors Ashutosh Varshney and Patrick Heller from Brown University, USA, formed a research partnership and developed the Janaagraha-Brown Citizenship Index. Along with Professor Siddharth Swaminathan from Azim Premji University, Bangalore as our academic collaborator in India, JB-CI is gathering systematic data on the relationship between citizenship and the delivery of public services. We are also looking into how citizens engage the state in cities across the country.
In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, we are expanding our research to look at the response and recovery of different communities with reference to citizenship and basic service delivery.
FINDINGS
Our Bangalore findings can be studied here:
- Citizenship in Urban India: Evidence from Bangalore
- Citizenship in Bangalore: A Practitioner’s Review
- Does citizenship abate class? Read our article in EPW here.
- Does Citizenship Abate Class? Evidence and Reflections from Bangalore, India
Opinion pieces based on the data collected on the seven last phase cities can be accessed here:
- So Far From Smart: Missing from India’s Smart Cities Plan: Citizen Participation
- Want a better quality of life?
- Hyderabad municipal polls showed booth-level officers not doing their job properly
- City municipalities are poor in fixing problems. People are turning to MLAs, middlemen, NGOs.
- Need for local access points for central administration of identity cards.
- Kochi has high levels of service delivery.
COVID-19 VACCINATION PENETRATION AMONG THE URBAN POOR
This research aimed to collect quantitative evidence on aspects around vaccine penetration among the urban poor in four cities: Chennai, Ahmedabad, Mumbai, and Kochi. The study assessed vaccine awareness, uptake, reasons for non-uptake, location of vaccine source and understanding how vaccines were coordinated. The survey was conducted from 6 May to 14 June 2021.
