Citizen Feedback Surveys in Indian Cities using Innovative Mobile Phone Based System

In 2009, the Ministry of Urban Development (MoUD) initiated Service Level Benchmarks (SLBs) to encourage municipalities and utilities as service providing agencies to collect data and provide information on service level indicators. This was to identify performance gaps and focus on service improvements across water supply, wastewater, solid waste management and storm-water drainage at the city and sub-city level. To address the lack of systematic and systemic availability of information related to service delivery levels, SLBs cover three information-axes:

1. Financial information
2. Operational efficiency
3. Citizen information.

In its current form, SLB-related information is collected only from service providers (the supply side) and doesn't engage citizens (demand side). There is a growing recognition that gauging service levels from a citizen's standpoint will provide a reality check on the perceived service quality, in addition to helping verify service level information received from service providers, encouraging citizens to demand better service and providing more granular data. It will also operationalize the 'Citizen Information' axis of the SLB in a more meaningful manner.

The Water and Sanitation Project (WSP) is World Bank commissioned and aims to fill this gap. It engages citizens' voice in service level assessment of water and sanitation across six Indian cities in three states to capture the actual experience of citizens and make service level information more robust.

Objectives

There are several intermediate objectives/outputs that the project aims to achieve as a means to the end. These are:

• Detailed information on the political economy and technical resources/capacities of concerned municipalities in water and sanitation service provision in all six cities. This knowledge will be synthesized in a an operation manual at the end of the project
• Gaps and service level information identified in service level based on a thorough, realistic and comprehensive assessment of current service level information from a user perspective
• Conduct training and discussion sessions to develop capacities of municipalities, local civil society actors, facilitators and enumerators for sustained affirmative action
• Disseminate survey findings by undertaking media outreach programmes
• Hold advocacy and policy dialogues with key government officials, policy makers, domain influencers and thought leaders
• Document learnings from entire project implementation to support city-level downstream work

Geographical spread

The project is spread across the following areas:

State	Cities
Rajasthan	Ajmer, Jhunjhunu
Uttar Pradesh	Varanasi, Rae Bareli
Madhya Pradesh	Bhopal, Jabalpur

Key components

Scoping study; Developing capacities of municipalities, local civil society actors/ facilitators and enumerators; Conducting surveys; Validating and reporting of the findings; Disseminating City level information and stakeholder engagement; and Disseminating SLB Connect survey findings/ learnings at the State and National levels.

Key outputs

• Enhanced capacities of local CSOs and citizens to provide feedback and demand better UWSS services from the municipalities and utilities;
• Enhanced capacities of municipalities and utilities to plan and provide better services by gathering and analyzing citizens' feedback;
• Availability of a pool of trained professionals in each city and state whose expertise could be drawn in scaling out mobile based technology enabled social accountability practices in other cities;
• Recognition and support from the state governments to 'institutionalize' mobile based technology enabled social accountability practices in municipalities and utilities;

Year/period

Apr – 2014 to March – 2015

Client

World Bank