Projects in Governance
RuralScope
While a number of public schemes exist in India for poverty alleviation in rural areas, their implementation is often plagued by corruption at all levels of administration. Data about actual spending and disbursement is often not publicly available. Local communities and even NGOs also lack the institutional capacity and expertise to collect and analyze large amounts of data.
RuralScope exists to combine interactive data visualization and social networks to create a participatory platform to empower citizens to track and identify corruption in disbursement of government funds in India.
Researchers including social scientists and government administrators will use RuralScope to visualize all available data in an intuitive manner to understand long term trends, compliance and performance of NREGA (National Rural Employment Guarantee Act of India) and to provide decision support. Eventually, we intend the project to be used by active members of the civil society who many use visualization tools, annotate data and share them with the rest of the community.
RuralScope has the potential to revolutionize the Indian government’s entire monitoring and evaluation process. RuralScope is also designed such that it can be easily adapted to any other similar development project worldwide that involves tracking of payments to large number of beneficiaries.