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

Transparent Chennai’s toilets layer got some publicity after the official launch of the site on Monday. The most detailed article, which ran in the Times of India (http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/chennai/Only-600-public-toilets-in-city/articleshow/6686444.cms), captured the nuances of our findings well, but was slightly off on one of our numbers. I want to take this opportunity to talk about our toilets layer in more detail here.

Our team became very interested in access to sanitation for the poor last year, and we began to ask questions about the number of public toilets in the city. When we approached the Chennai Corporation for information about the total number of public toilets and their locations, they told us to go to the zonal offices because they did not have the information. So, one of our team members visited each of the city’s ten zonal offices, and asked whether they could provide her a list of the toilets in their zone. Zonal staff were, for the most, bemused by our interest, and provided the information voluntarily. But before we put the data up on the site, we decided to file an RtI application for the same information, just to confirm our numbers. We were really surprised to find that the numbers were all completely different. Here’s a table with the numbers that we first received from the Zonal offices and what the RtI data turned up.

The numbers are not radically different, but these discrepancies still bring up important questions about the management of toilets in the city. If the Chennai Corporation does not have a central register of toilets, how do they know where more toilets are needed? How is “access” to sanitation across the city even calculated when the city government does not have a central register of the number and location of public toilets? How much money is allocated for improving access to sanitation in the city, and how are strategies to improve sanitation decided upon?

We hope to be exploring these questions in more detail in our research over the next couple of months, and plan to hold a meeting on public toilets and access to sanitation, particularly for women in the city, in November. Check back for details of this meeting if you’re interested in this topic, or contact us to help us in mapping and surveying toilets in the city!

- Nithya V Raman