Rapid action against corruption in India (RAACI)

REAL TIME SOUSVEILLANCE

For years we have been hearing that there is nothing to be done against corruption in India. Corruption is treated as some amorphous cloud of red tape. The proposition I want to make is to create an infrastructure which will introduce transparency to every individual in India. We can empower the individual to isolate, track and monitor government expenditure to the street level and give them tools to find out exactly who is responsible for each role.

The idea is simple, consolidate and filter knowledge to their relevant geographic locations and follow it up with crowd sourced tracking. If we isolate corrupt activities, all individuals within that area have immediate notification.

I am looking to get a team together of 10-15 dedicated people who will help build out this open source project to track corruption in India. Using scraping and crowd sourced information from RTI, we can create a centralized database of all financial transactions within India. This is stage one.

Stage two involves, geographically mapping these transactions onto the map of India. What we accomplish by doing this is saturating the problem of solving corruption by empowering the citizenry of India to attack local problems. The common pattern with corruption is that it is mostly top down and to root out corruption we need to do a back trace on the flow of money to see where it is misused. What we are basically enabling with this technology is surveillance.

Using mobile phones we can crowdsource data gathering, data integrity, data processing and verification of contracts. We then color code each contract, then we will prepare sorted lists in descending order with highest amount of corruption at the top. These lists will be emailed on a weekly basis to CBI, Government of India and other institutions which are supposed to persecute. The beauty of this system is a citizen can make an RTI on the status of an RTI enquiry and prosecute people who are impeding the cleansing of corruption. No department or funded institution can match the processing power of the citizens of India.