Electoral Accountability!

Elected officials are currently facing a crisis of accountability in India. Elections happen on a regular basis, but elected representatives do not seem to have incentives in place to address the needs of their constituencies as a whole.

One of the biggest problems is that there is a lack of information available to the public – about the roles and responsibilities of an elected legislator, about their performance in fulfilling their duties, and about the needs and problems of constituencies. Transparent Chennai is attempting to address these issues before the municipal elections in October, 2011 in two ways.

Firstly, Transparent Chennai is putting together a database of the available information about the performance of elected representatives in office. Our database looks at how many questions they asked in council sessions and what kinds of questions, how much of their discretionary funds was spent for their wards, and notes their attendance at council and zonal meetings. We also talk about the roles and responsibilities of elected representatives. Click through the pages on the left to see more information about how hard your elected representatives have been working for you!

Secondly, the Transparent Chennai team is putting together an experiment in accountability in one ward before the municipal elections. So much of the information needed for accountability lies in the realm of the informal. We can easily experience city problems – we know where waterlogging happens in our neighborhoods, where garbage piles up, where it is impossible to cross the street because of traffic and obstructions – but the government does not keep a record of these things. There is no way to understand problems at the aggregate level, no way to understand the city’s performance in addressing these problems, and to record improvements when they happen.

Our hypothesis is that cheaper and more ubiquitous technologies have given citizens the means through which we can actually create the data that we need for accountability.

Join us for our Ward Accountability Experiment – the first time that citizens will be coming together to create the data needed for real accountability in India! We will be using low-tech paper maps and simple surveys to gather information on the state of three services in the ward – garbage collection, public sanitation (toilets), and walkability. Click through the pages in this section to learn more details.

Our partners for this experiment include the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy, Reclaim our Beaches, Concern Awareness and Responsibility for the Environment (CARE), Rotaract Club of Madras, Center for Environment Education, Ethiraj College, and Madras Christian College. Students will also be joining us from the Madras School of Social Work and from IIT-Madras.