Janaagraha is a Bengaluru-headquartered non-profit (Trust) founded in 2001 working towards the mission of transforming quality of life in India’s cities and towns. Janaagraha works with citizens and elected representatives (mostly notably, municipal councilors) to catalyse active citizenship in city neighbourhoods and with governments to institute reforms to city governance (what we refer as “city-systems”).
Our experience in urban governance spans over two decades, characterized by City-Systems approach, comprising root cause analysis and affecting systems change to improve Quality of life for all in Indian cities and towns. Janaagraha works across two major programmatic strands: Municipal Finance & Civic Participation; with a backbone of Policy & Insights that includes Governance (Municipal Law & Policy), Climate (Environment City-Systems), Health (Public Health City-Systems), and Equity (focussing on Women and the Urban Poor).
We have worked extensively on urban policy and governance reforms for over two decades including work with the Second Administrative Reforms Commission, Planning Commission, the XIII and XIV Finance Commissions, MoU with XV Finance Commission, the Karnataka Administrative Reforms Commission – II, the 6th State Finance Commission of Haryana, the Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration and Election Commission of India, ongoing MoUs/engagements with Comptroller and Auditor General of India, Capacity Building Commission, Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs and state governments of Odisha, Uttar Pradesh, and Assam, as well as with several city governments. Our partnership with the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA), Government of India comprised conceiving, designing, implementing, and managing www.cityfinance.in as the national digital platform for standardized timely, and credible financial information on India’s cities (municipalities), besides conceiving and implementing the Swachhata mobile app, and supporting property tax and other municipal finance reforms.
As part of our State Urban Transformation Agenda (SUTrA), we have partnerships with state governments namely Odisha, where our work involves improved public finance management, improved workforce efficiency through people-process reengineering and strengthened community participation; Karnataka, wherein we engage with state and city governments in institutionalizing civic participation among other initiatives; Uttar Pradesh, where our work is broad-based on governance; and Assam, where we engage in strengthening public finance and people and process systems and are the anchor partner to the state governments ‘Ten Cities Development Program’ (Doh Shaher, Ek Rupayan) for well-planned and sustainable urban development of 10 cities.
Several of our updates here will focus on progress on the Doh Shaher, Ek Rupayan, the replicability of our work across states and our engagement at the Union Level using the enablers of city data, municipal finances and decentralisation.