India rising - in ambient accountability too? 3 great ideas and 3 sad implementations
Long overdue, some more reflections on a 2015 holiday trip with the family to India. Not being able any more to take off my ambient accountability lens here some entirely random observations:
ambient accountability - dimension 1: giving you your rights and entitlements right when and where you need them
taxi fares and taxi passenger rights: as captured previously, for example in Italy or Colombia, this is a global movement under way and here a particularly charming and somewhat improvised example from Goa: the applicable rates lovingly handwritten onto the glove compartment for the passenger to be aware of
and even on the windows, gently providing subtitles to the scenery passing by and making sure that you really cannot fail to spot the price that’s right.
ambient accountability - dimension 2: making government performance and outcomes easier to monitor right where it takes place
Air pollution in Beijing might get most of the disturbing global headlines, but air quality in Indian cities is believed to be even worse. So kudos to the government for its idea to set up big electronic displays that show real-time readings for some of the most important air quality parameters and also offer a pretty intuitive traffic light color-coding scheme for a quick grasp of how bad things are at the moment.
And in true ambient accountability spirit the display pictured here (one in a network of several across Delhi), is actually placed where lots of pretty important government officials and city elites tread.
So this looks like a pretty good way to hold up the mirror to these people and confront them with the fruits of their environmental stewardship.
Well, not, really. This board outside Lodi Gardens seemed to have a bad hair day and marked all relevant indicators (at the bottom) as not available.
ambient accountability dimension 3 : make it easy to complain where things go wrong
Providing information and channels to complain right where citizens might fall prey to corruption can plausibly be expected to deter bad behaviour.
And Delhi certainly had its share of efforts to create such feedback and complaints interfaces and integrate them into public spaces right where they matter most.
Here a note on a pillar in the arrival hall of the airport:
And here a policy information point right in the middle of a busy neighborhood, encouraging people to report to the police.
Both efforts look well-intentioned but it is doubtful how effective they can actually be: the half-torn of note at the airport arrival was difficult to spot, the referenced complaints box was nowhere to be seen, not exactly instilling great trust in the workings of this system. And both the airport feedback and police reporting notifications have two fatal flaws in common: they provide way too many options and do not explain at all what will happen with complaints and who will read them, follow up how and when. thus confusing, rather than encouraging citizens looking for orientation and a trustworthy point to complain.
So the overall verdict of this shockingly unscientific exploration into Indian ambient accountability?
Many interesting splinters and good intentions. Yet much appears more like an afterthought, a careless box-ticking exercise rather than a truly committed, sufficiently resourced and carefully designed feature or intervention. Now this is not an Indian problem. It very much puts ambient accountability in India in line with its current state in most other countries: overlooked, under-hyped, insufficiently researched and poorly though-out - despite its great potential to empower and hold to account.
(all pictures cc Dieter Zinnbauer)
