The Birth of Janaagraha

Ramesh Ramanathan
Co-founder, Jana Group

As a member of the Bangalore Agenda Task Force (BATF), I had anchored the completion of a major part of the financial restructuring of Bangalore City Corporation by June 2001. Twenty months, twenty-two people, two hundred thousand man-hours. The internal plumbing of information was now largely in place. Half the work had been done: supply-side reform. Time to bring in the other half: demand-side participation.

The whole exercise was meant to be the basis for citizen involvement in an organised, scientific manner. I had been inspired by the Porto Alegre model in Brazil, where participatory budgeting had proven to be so successful: doubling of the city budget, improvement of transparency, dramatic change in the quality of life on several counts.

When the accounting exercise was done, we had planned to move to citizen participation in the planning activities, starting with the budget. Over the course of this exercise, we had seen four commissioners. Around April 2001, I began the discussions with the latest commissioner on how to now bring citizens into the budgeting activities of the BMP for the next budget, to be announced in January 2002, for the year 2002-03. He kept saying, “Yes, we will do it. Let us discuss this next week,” and so on. Never saying no, but never committing yes. Finally, after a few months of these delays, I requested a meeting with Nandan Nilekani and the commissioner. It was in Infosys, late one evening in August.

I started, “One of the reasons for the accounting reforms was so that we could have citizen participation. And now that the accounting work is pretty much done, we are ready to bring citizens into the budgeting process for the next budget, 2002-03, to be announced in January.”

Nandan added, “We have been talking of this for a few months now, and it is time to go ahead. We need a clear signal now.”

The commissioner finally made his position clear. “We cannot do it now. The BMP council elections are due in November. We cannot do anything that would cause the Election Commission to take action against us. So we have to wait until after the elections.”

“But that is not until November or December,” I protested, “by then it will be too late for the coming year’s budget. This is a gigantic exercise, getting citizens across the entire city to participate. And it has never been done before. There will be mistakes. We need to learn from some pilots and then scale this up.”

Nandan said, “Okay, if you cannot do this, the BATF will take this up for the time being. And then the BMP can join in after the elections. This way, we won’t lose any time.”

And this was when the full hand was revealed. “If we cannot do it, you cannot do it as well. The BATF is a creature of the government — you have the same constraints as we do. I am sorry, but this citizen participation idea cannot begin.”

The meeting ended. Three years of working towards a single goal looked like it was being crushed.

As I drove home, I called Swati. I was frustrated. “It is not going to come through,” I said. “In fact, it is clear to me now — the system will never want this.”

As I described the situation, Swati said, “Maybe this is the right thing to happen, Ramesh. Maybe the citizens need a platform that can never be hijacked, a platform that belongs to them and no one else.”

“Start this platform,” she said.

“But how, when, what do I have?” I spluttered.

“Let us do it together. I will work with you to make this happen,” she said, calming me down.

We spent the entire night talking about the sudden idea, little knowing how it was going to overwhelm us in the years to come. By the morning, it was clear what needed to be done. Over the past three years, Swati had been involved indirectly in the BATF work, supporting me. Rishab had just started school that summer, and she finally had her chance to start her design work that she had been planning all along. Now, she was giving this up.

I called Nandan later that morning, “We are committed to the citizen participation idea, Nandan,” I said. “Swati and I are planning to start something for this. And so, I am submitting my resignation from the BATF.”

“Nonsense!” Nandan said. “I can see why you want to start this, and I can see how the BATF is constrained. You don’t have to leave the BATF and I assure you of all my support.”

We called it CPG: Campaign for Participatory Governance. There was no name. We discussed the idea with the first friends whom we knew in development, Ashish and Munira Sen. In their house, with our children playing, we drew up the broad plan. Then we discussed it with Unni Rajagopal, our friend at SDU, the Chartered Accountancy firm.

Our first presentation outside this group of friends was to a group of 5 people — including Dharen Chadda of Momentum, the communications strategy firm — in a small, unlit room in Vishranti Nilayam off Infantry Road. The response was overwhelming: “Go for it!” they said.

Swati anchored the entire backbone of the campaign. She pored over every little detail, every process to ensure that ‘citizen participation’ was not an empty phrase; it actually meant something concrete, with specific outputs. One example was converting the citizens’ wish list into a fully-costed printout that they could then use to prioritise within their ward: there were hundreds of tiny steps involved in going from “My road needs to be asphalted” to being able to sit with hundreds of others in the entire ward, with full data of all the requirements, in real money terms, and prioritising the needs. This was what participation was about: scientific engagement in a well-structured process, with good quality data.

There were several people who gave up their lives over the next few months: Mr Manjunath, an acquaintance who was a builder and an ex-BMP contractor, worked with Swati to give the specifications for the software to cost the engineering works exactly the way the government would, following their Public Works Department Schedule of Rates. Ashish and Munira took the launching of this campaign as a personal priority and allowed their lives to be invaded on every issue. Anjana Iyer came on board to work with 3 pilot communities, helping us learn how to actually go about getting citizen participation. Dharen Chaddha and Ashutosh Wakkankar anchored communications. Mr Venkataramanan of Indiranagar RISE was the first community leader to take to the idea: he helped create a simple and easy-to-use system to collect information from non-technical citizens. Col. Rudra joined as our first volunteer, anchoring administration when there wasn’t even an office; he had four weeks to set us up before we launched the campaign. Rohini Nilekani called us saying, “You’ll are doing something exciting! I want you to know that you have my full support,” and within a few days, helped bring us the mass media support that we needed.

As all this was happening, we needed to do the communications work in parallel. Despite all the back-end work, the first challenge was to attract citizens to join the campaign. We knew that once they came, they would be overwhelmed by all the detailed preparation

that we had done. However, without government support, with just a group of citizens launching this somewhat crazy idea, we needed a powerful message to get citizens to stir out of their homes. We held focus group sessions with different citizen groups: retired people, college students, homemakers, to ask them what they thought of government, whether they felt citizen involvement could be the answer, and whether they would participate.

From these sessions, we learned many things about what held people back: they cared deeply about the city; they were cynical of government; they wanted to believe that they could make a difference; they were tired of seeing yet another do-gooder activity that would disappear like water droplets in the desert; they wanted reasurrance that any new idea had the basic credibility to make them stir.

As far as the approach of any such campaign was concerned, there was a choice to make: should we take a confrontational approach or try a different track. There was a deep-rooted anger, a negative energy that could be harnessed through a confrontational approach. But this had limitations. More importantly, it was not consistent with the fundamental belief that there were good people in government as well. Two years of working inside the BMP had exposed me to several of them. As we discussed this approach, Dharen asked, “If this campaign was a person, and he or she walked in through the door, who would it be? Which personality best captures the values and ethos of this idea?” Several names were suggested but it was clear that one name exemplified all that we aspired to be: Gandhi, as he returned in 1914 to India, full of hope and optimism to transform the trajectory of our country. And doing it in a manner that gave a new meaning to ‘constructive engagement.’

So this was our approach: a firm, constructive engagement with the government; a fresh start, one that was infused with positive energy rather than negativity. Now, this needed to be packaged into a communications idea, to convince the citizen that we could succeed,

that it would be worth their effort. We were clear that we would use all the successful practices of the private sector in our work: communications, technology, process management, and so on.

We believed strongly that just because the work was in the public space, we had no excuse to be less than professional in our commitment or delivery. Our target market was the average citizen, not the activist. The message was ‘practical patriotism,’ where one did not have to give up one’s life to make a difference; that you could still have your family and work and entertainment, and also be an active citizen. We were like any other product on the supermarket shelf. Our product was ‘participation,’ the currency with which the citizen was buying our product was ‘time.’ Given the pressures that are placed on the average citizen’s time, it was important to ensure that we had a process that gave them value-for-time.

A communications idea had emerged, one that would have opinion leaders of the city endorsing the campaign and asking citizens to take responsibility. Nandan was already a supporter; Devraj of SDU knew Vishnu Vardhan, got an interview for us; we met him in his dressing room at a shooting, with his make-up still on. Ashutosh spoke to Syed Kirmani, and I went to meet Dr Devi Shetty. All four of them agreed to publicly support the campaign in any mass media advertising effort.

Meera Pillai, a documentary film-maker introduced by Ashish, came to one of the grassroot citizen meetings that we had started holding. At the end, she said, “Hi, I’m Meera and I am making a short film of what you are about. It is an impressive idea. I need three days.” I was bowled over. It was a Thursday evening. She sent us the script on Friday; we discussed it on Saturday; shot it on Sunday at Nrityagram (Lynne was very kind to allow us to shoot there); edited it on Monday, and had it delivered to us by the evening!

We had no clue how much the whole campaign would cost. A rough estimate done late in September suggested about Rs. 1 crore. Swati and I looked at each other and said, “If we are passionate about it, then let us do it with excellence. No short-cuts.” We spoke to Unni and he ensured that the Ramanathan Foundation that we had started earlier to support various causes could be used to finance this campaign.

We still needed a name and a logo. Several candidates were considered, and rejected. Along the way, I had been reading about Gandhi. One morning, I was shaving and telling Swati how he had come up with the name ‘Satyagraha’ for the civil disobedience movement in South Africa: the combination of ‘satya’ and ‘agraha,’ meaning ‘the moral force of truth.’ As I said this, she shouted excitedly, “I’ve got it!! I’ve got the name!” I nicked myself at the sudden outburst.

“What is it?” I asked.

“’Jana – agraha’ the moral force of the people,” she said, “It’s perfect.”

We spoke to Sanskrit experts, making sure of the meaning, and the various interpretations of ‘agraha.’ It worked in all languages.

The three months leading to the launch were mad: sleepless nights, days rolling into nights, children forgotten with our parents, grassroot meetings to understand the citizen response and fine tune the launch. Little did we know that this was nothing compared to what would happen to our lives after the launch.

On 8 December 2001, we launched Janaagraha. There was a small press conference. There was also a half-page advertisement with Nandan Nilekani, Syed Kirmani, Devi Shetty and Vishnu Vardhan, saying, “Here are some foolish people who believe they can transform

Bangalore,” going on to say that dreams are always made by fools. It asked the citizen, “If you are a fool, call us!”

Thousands got in touch. In letters, through phone calls, at local meetings. “I am a fool! I am willing to dream, tell me what to do!” each one of them said.

The madness had begun.