It has been a while since I last blogged. I could not find an appropriate topic to blog about. Moreover, the team has been blogging regularly about latest events and updates, so I waited till I was adequately inspired to put down my thoughts in words. Today seems to be the day. As I sit at home enjoying the long weekend, I can’t help but think about Transparent Chennai, and the team’s dream to make it a citizens-led platform. Each and every member of our team has an aspiration for this polluted and crowded yet strikingly beautiful city of Chennai. After the successful launch of our website, our aspirations and dreams look slightly more realistic and achievable. By asking our users to contribute, we have moved one step closer to our dream. There is this one thought that keeps the team going – ‘What if Transparent Chennai succeeds in its endeavor to empower its citizens?’ While that remains a question to be answered in due time, one might wonder who the real master minds are behind the project.

I would call them the men ‘behind the scenes’. Prabu Raja from the tech team, without whom our mapping project would have been impossible, says “I am very fond of mapping and work towards improving the technology for development. I want to leverage my skills to reach out to the citizens by allowing them to view data on exciting and easy-to-understand maps.” When asked about the city, Prabu tells me, “I hate traffic jams and I feel sad about slum dwellers living close to Cooum who suffer the most when Chennai gets flooded during incessant rains. Chennai in my dreams would be a city where all these issues have been taken care of.” Muthukumaran, who sits right next to Prabu, shares similar thoughts. “I really enjoy working on this project because the very idea that I can reach out to Chennai’s residents through this medium excites me,” says Muthu. “I only hope that people appreciate this project and come forward to join us in this modest effort of ours to change Chennai for the better.” Muthu is the man behind the interesting design of the website which has evolved over time  to become more user-friendly and catchy.

Meryl Mary Sebastian, our longest standing intern, leads a hapless life as she goes around from one zonal office to the other searching for mapable data. She might be the youngest member in our team but don’t you underestimate her skills to gather and organize data. “This project introduced me to ideas of how and what a city could be. I love that we are creating a space for information that will empower and encourage the citizens of Chennai to participate in the planning and shaping of their city,” says our intern. All that she aspires for is a ‘clean and green Chennai!’ Our newest member Vaishnavi Narasimhan has been on a roll ever since she joined the project. When questioned, she gives a curt reply – “I would like to see more trees and less garbage.” Vaishnavi has been traveling to each and every place in the city where one can find heaps of garbage. If you are a resident of Chennai, you would know that her task is practically endless. She also loves chatting up with groups and organizations and has been crucial in getting the project its due publicity.  We have one another Muthu working from home, who is invisible even to the team, but his work speaks for him. Whenever we have a problem of transferring data to the GIS platform, we look towards Muthu for solutions. His data cleaning work involves a lot of patience and time, and the team in its entirety was really happy to meet him during the launch of TC!

There have been 10 more interns for this project from different parts of the world who came and worked with us because they found the project interesting and exciting. All these members are invisible to the citizens we reach out to, but they are undoubtedly the real face of this project. Three cheers to all of you out there. Of course, there is something about this project that brings us all together – this project is about how we can make each and every day of our lives better. The website has massive potential which can be realized when more, and eventually all of us, come together and realize our duty to voice our opinions as informed and empowered residents of Chennai. Imagine- One day all of you MIGHT have enough walking space in Chennai, an excellent public transport which takes you to your destination in no time, a flyover which serves its very purpose, pollution free roads and parks, a clean and hygienic place to pee whenever you feel like and not having to hold it till you reach home, door to door collection of garbage and no mountains of smelly filth strewn around the streets of Chennai! Nobody but you can change this ‘MIGHT’ to ‘WILL’. We have already taken a number of steps towards getting closer to our dream and probably yours as well, but the rest is your responsibility.

Contact us immediately!

Posted by Somya Sethuraman

This week, we have created a layer which allows you, the user, to mark a location on the map. We are putting this out here as a proof of concept/ technology and we hope that some individuals or groups will want to create a layer of their own using this tool. If you are interested in creating a thematic layer around a particular topic of interest, do get in touch with us. We also encourage you to contribute to this blog and contact us for any other kind of information you would like to see on this or if you would like to collaborate in some way.

Upcoming features over the next few weeks will include a layer on Solid Waste Management, a layer which will allow you to tag a location on the map and lodge a complaint with the Chennai Corporation, an online polling feature and a mailing list. Stay tuned and do keep checking in. If you would like to get updates on new features/ blogposts, please contact us and we will pre-register you on our mailing list when we roll it out.

Some quick usage stats from Google Analytics:

Though this site has been live and attracting users for over 6 months, the response to our launch event has been amazing! We have had over 2800 users (see the map below) visiting the site since our ‘official’ launch 10 days ago! These 2800+ users have spent an average of approximately 5 minutes on the site and there have been 12,250 page views! What’s more, about 2200 of these visitors are ‘unique’ visitors. Considering the niche segment the site caters to (citizens concerned about one particular city in India), these are very heartening statistics.

Understandably, a majority of our visitors (~1800) have been from India and of these ~1800, about 1300 from Chennai. What is surprising, however, is the no. of visitors from all over the world from Dubai, London, Muscat, Singapore to almost every major city in the US!

We thank our visitors for their support and hope to continue providing exciting content to all visitors!

Posted by Akshai Abraham

I first heard about this project “Transparent Chennai” from an intern working on the project at CDF sometime in the month of July. Upon learning what the project was endeavouring for the Chennai citizens, the component that most interested me was the mapping of city’s bus routes. Having been fleeced by the auto drivers of Chennai in the first two months of my stay in the city, I was just starting to explore buses as an option to run my errands around the city.

So soon after the TC launch on 4th October, I logged in to check out the feature on bus routes. In the past week thanks to TC I have discovered two new bus routes from Adyar to Santhome (6D and 21T) in addition to a new bus stop near home (this one sadly has no bus shed or a board to announce its existence to the commuters!). But TC mappers discovered this one too!!!

By playing around with this tool, one can discover the various permutation and combination of buses available between two destinations. For example, now I know that by breaking my journey at Satya studio while commuting from Adyar to Santhome, I can greatly increase my options. There are 5 bus routes from Adyar to Satya studio and 4 more between Satya studio and Santhome. This is in addition to the 2 new direct bus route discoveries made through TC. Now you can see the humongous jump in my bus route options.

Our TC is truly an apt acronym for “Take Care” I would say….

Posted by Sivapradha, Researcher, Centre for Development Finance, IFMR