Postcard From India – Part 2

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From Mumbai I then traveled to Delhi, India’s capital city. It was there that I met with Prukalpa Sankar and Varun Banka, co-founders of SocialCops, a civic tech startup that harnesses citizen voice to solve local problems. I first read about SocialCops in a FastCompany article last year and I was excited for the opportunity to sit down with Prukalpa and Varun to learn more about their work. SocialCops found its roots at the 2012 Microsoft Imagine Cup in Singapore, where the group was Runner Up. Today the young company has impacted numerous decisions including improving street safety to better national level healthcare decisions.

Housed in an unassuming residential building in South Delhi’s Malviya Nagar neighborhood, I almost missed their office. Luckily, Prukalpa emerged just in time to greet me and we went in to chat. Upon entry the office looks quintessentially startup with a row of computers lining the wall, one big table for meetings, and of course: coffee.

When asked about their favorite project to date, Prukalpa said, and Varun agreed, it was their first campaign:

“Our first pilot was with a Municipal Ward in Delhi in collaboration with a citizen’s group called ‘Let’s Do it! Delhi!’. We worked with a citizen group that was focusing on the cleanliness of streets. Just like people rate restaurants on Yelp, Delhi citizens were asked to rate the cleanliness of their streets. Public workers in the areas being monitored were then rewarded based on citizens’ ratings. Local government sponsored prizes for the top five public workers whose districts received the highest ratings. To our surprise, the winners unanimously came forward and requested trophies over cash bonuses. Rather than receive bonuses, the street cleaners wanted public recognition from their local ward councilors.”

 

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Humayun’s Tomb Complex, Delhi

Varun added, “We’d just got out of university and moved to India and said ‘Let’s do this!’ The first project was really special. Initial times were pretty hard but after 3-4 months in the zone it was all worth it. The long hours paid off and we were inspired to continue with SocialCops.”

SocialCops offers their platform for free to nonprofit organizations that collect data and allow them to co-own the data to use for larger scale decision-making. This is allowing them to crowdsource data sets from remote parts of the country that were previously collected on paper. The company generates revenue by charging organizations for their data management and visualization tools. The time is ripe for this company to grow: at the end of end of October 2014, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India reported that the number of mobile phone subscribers had surpassed 943.9 million (the 2011 Census reported a countrywide population of just over 1.2 billion). And with smartphones seeing a 40% YOY Untitledgrowth, apps that encourage citizen participation are gaining popularity. Varun put it this way: “Two years ago, we were explaining data, crowdsourcing, and apps. Today there is not only an understanding of the taxonomy, but we are also seeing engagement in these areas. WhatsApp and Facebook are dominating the app market in India, and Viber is growing in popularity.”

SocialCops finds its niche at the intersection of technology, governments and nonprofits. Said Prukalpa, “There is a lot of bureaucracy for startups to work directly with government. We partner with nonprofits that can work with government. We want to be the platform that can work with both parties to make the most impact.” So what does the future look like for SocialCops? “We hope to power other platforms to get real-time data. Education, housing, infrastructure—these are all areas where we want to mine data in the next five years.” Prukalpa and Varun have data (of course!) and anecdotes to fuel their work. One NGO executive told the team that he’d been working at the same nonprofit organization for 40 years, was going to retire in 10 years, and felt confident that with the tool provided to him by SocialCops he could accomplish in 10 years what had taken him 40.

As civic tech takes off around the world, SocialCops is a company to watch.

For Part 1 of Thea’s adventures, click here.