Hungry for change? Solve a public problem

State, Society, Market

A lot of people ask me, what can I do to make things a little better on the development front? My first instinct is to reply that there is not much that they alone can do, but there is surely a lot that they, too, can do. Let me explain what I mean with an example.

A number of young people in Mumbai, who’ve decided early in their lives to be self-motivated change-makers, got together some months ago to distribute food and rations to migrant workers in desperate poverty during the Covid-19 lockdown. Each week, they went around the major transit stations, handing out relief, calling their effort “Khaana Chahiye” (I need food). A few companies helped (Wipro, PayTM, Godrej), and crowd-funding added a bit more money.

This is such an absolute good thing to do that it quickly got the support of Parle-G, appropriately a company that makes food products, and the initiative became slightly more sustainable. This went on, week after week. Meanwhile, the volunteers started to think about scale, recognising that there’s only so much that they themselves could do. They approached the local municipal body -- the Mumbai corporation -- to see how it could take over this programme, eventually to cover the whole city.

That got a few public officials genuinely interested in tackling the problem involved. They begin to co-ideate with the volunteers to scale the effort. And together, they began to ask how a proper programme could be put together in the corporation -- replete with the usual committees, plan, budget, etc., but also with participation from citizens.

It always helps to make all of this better understood through data, and at Mapunity, we decided to build a platform for this. It took a few tweaks of some earlier technology that we’ve had lying around, but with feedback from the volunteers, a data-collection app was quickly put together, making the groundwork a little easier. More importantly, this kind of effort makes it easier to ‘show’ the problem, and a lot more people connect readily with that.

Figuring out how to make this scale also needed people who could study the data and analyse what the gaps to be filled were. That created room for public policy folks to get involved, and I suggested that the new Kautilya School of Public Policy could get involved, mostly because my good friend Sridhar Pabbisetty and others there are interested in working on extreme poverty issues. With this, some of the volunteers could hope to see their work formally recognised in an academic space, too.

The growing strength allowed reach-out to more people. Another friend, Roshan Shankar, who works closely with the Delhi government on a number of issues, began to explore how the state government there could work more formally with these ideas in larger areas. A few MLAs in the city could be requested to help, we felt. There’s a whole other initiative on constituency management that is emerging from that collaboration. More on that another time.

One of the other things I’ve been working on is to see how children can get involved in public problem-solving early in life. While most of their civics learning is on environment, health, livelihoods, etc., there’s no reason why even more complex things like food security could not also be taught. And so, I connected Kautilya to an immersive civics-learning programme I know in Chennai, to see how we could build a template that other schools, too, could use.

All these things have the same goal -- increase the number of people working on the problem, making deliberate connections between them along the way. I’ve reached a point with this kind of effort where it now is a standard feature on my calendar, bringing people together because they share interests and capabilities in working on some problem or the other. Rajesh Kasturirangan and I plan to teach a course about all this in the spring at Socratus, the solving platform for wicked problems, and hopefully later in the year at Kautilya.

Each of us could ask the same question: Can I identify a local problem about which I care deeply, and to which I am willing to contribute time and effort, which can then be part of a much larger ecosystem of problem-solvers, all doing their part to tackle it? In short, can we see that these problems are social and political, not technical and managerial? And can we work on them across society and government, too?

A couple of weeks ago, I tweeted asking if people in different neighbourhoods in Bengaluru would like to work on public problems in their own areas. About 40 people wrote to me in response to that, indicating what they’d like to do, and in some cases asking how they could get started. I see that as proof of latent interest in society -- there are enough people out there who care.

Some people even wrote in from abroad, asking if there were things they could do remotely. Of course, there’s always something one can do, by teaming up with others. And some respondents wrote from other cities and towns in Karnataka, asking if the effort was limited to Bengaluru. Of course not. And I learned from them too, about problems that are quite different in other places.

“Khaana Chahiye” is an example, but it’s also a metaphor. The power to do good within us is much larger than we usually imagine. But it’s not all within us -- there’s a twist to this. Some part of our power is distributed among many others, and some of their power in turn is within us. When we exchange that with each other, the world begins to change.