Bengaluru: Ashoka University recently announced the launch of Civinc, a first-of-its-kind mobile application and online portal that provides information and contact details of municipal elected representatives and municipal employees in one seamless platform.
The project was conceptualised by Ashoka University alumna Aishwarya Sunaad under the mentorship of Dr. Debayan Gupta, Assistant Professor of Computer Science.
The portal was officially launched in Nanjangud, Mysore district, by Darshan Dhruvanarayan, MLA, at a special event in the presence of the Municipal Council along with Vijaya, Commissioner, Nanjangud City Municipal Council (NCMC) and Mythravathi B.N., Assistant Executive Engineer (Environment), NCMC.
The southern pilgrimage city is now the first Nagarsabha in the country to digitise its civic data, paving the way for non-metro cities and towns across India to adopt robust technology and innovation to make governance efficient.
Civinc, a portmanteau of the words ‘civic’ and ‘link’, has been designed to give citizens direct access to the contacts of elected corporators/councillors, ward-level department heads and municipal employees responsible for essential public services.
Covering functions from sanitation and garbage collection to road maintenance, property tax, and building licenses, Civinc replaces opaque grievance portals with direct, transparent connections between citizens and government functionaries.
Developed by harnessing the power of data, technology, and rigorous research, Civinc leverages ward-specific QR code boards placed across the city, which citizens can scan to get in touch with municipal employees handling specific civic issues.
Users do not need to download the app separately to raise their grievances. The platform also empowers users to contribute data or flag outdated information, and features a first-of-its-kind performance review for municipal employees, thus enabling greater civic participation and enhancing administrative accountability.
Dhruvanarayan, the MLA of Nanjangud constituency and the youngest in the Karnataka Legislative Assembly, said “Nanjangud is proud to lead the way as the first non-metro city in India to digitise its civic data. Giving citizens direct access to officials who are responsible for essential services makes governance more transparent, responsive and efficient. This is a youth-led project and I firmly believe that we should work collaboratively with the country’s youth to conceptualise interventions to solve problems, which is how this project was deployed here. It is also essential for local administrations to adopt high-end technological solutions to address issues and administrative bottlenecks in order to improve everyday lives. Therefore, there is a need for young people to innovate governance-related solutions specifically.
Debayan Gupta said: “The launch of Civinc is a moment of immense pride for us at Ashoka University. It is a product of deep commitment to address social problems leveraging technological interventions. I am excited to see Civinc demonstrate how technology, guided by social insight, can transform governance and empower communities.”
Sharing her inspiration behind developing the app, Aishwarya Sunaad, an incoming scholar at the University of Oxford said, “Civinc was born out of my desire to address everyday civic challenges that became even more apparent during the Covid-19 pandemic. The majority of citizens do not have clarity on whom to contact for which issue, and so civic problems continue to remain unaddressed due to lack of civic participation. And why should the conversation on technology and governance be focussed only around India’s metro cities? It is imperative that we innovate to make India’s non-metro cities tech-enabled.”
The Civinc portal, which was supported by the Isaac Centre for Public Policy (ICPP) at Ashoka University and the Mozilla Responsible Computing Challenge, was built wholly by students, with the end-to-end technology having been developed by Harsh Raj and Aditya Sinha, from the National Institute of Technology, Jamshedpur.
With this scalable model, Civinc is now poised to expand across the country, helping more towns and cities improve governance and service delivery through technology-driven solutions.
