Rise of Civic Tech in India’s urban governance! The coronavirus pandemic has redefined digital ecosystems in each sphere of life. With men and women turning to embrace technologies like never ever just before, we can see the ripple impact across regional communities that have been earlier excluded from reaping the added benefits of digitally enabled services. To what extent can this go forward in shaping the rise of CivicTech in the future of our cities? We are about to locate out.
In this exclusive interaction with TheSpuzz Online, Shilpa Kumar highlights the rise of digital ecosystems that are rising the momentum in terms of benefiting these who have been earlier excluded from the digital society altogether. In her words, “For instance, there is currently an increased momentum of technological innovations in the judicial system as well as in our urban and healthcare infrastructure. A strong governmental tech backbone can deliver services more effectively and can cut the dependency of ordinary citizens on interaction and transaction-based services.”
An alumnus of IIM-Kolkata, Shilpa Kumar has spent more than 3 decades with the ICICI Bank group, and has held board positions in various organisations. A essential component of her profession pertains to monetary markets. Further, she has also served on regulatory committees which includes SEBI’s Secondary Markets Advisory Committee, RBI’s Technical Advisory Committee and RBI’s Mohanty Committee on Monetary Policy. Further, she also held essential positions in business bodies such as FIMMDA, and the FICCI Capital Markets Committee in addition to serving on the advisory committees of the NSE, BSE and National Securities Depository Ltd.
She additional adds, “We at ONI have recently kickstarted a very interesting initiative called Citizen Innovation Lab (CIL), in partnership with CIIE.CO. The aim of this platform is to promote this space of legal, civic and property tech by addressing the various different pillars that are crucial to a successful startup ecosystem. CIL will build knowledge about the sector, its opportunities and challenges, it will engage with colleges to seed entrepreneurial energy and will activate regional ecosystems. The ultimate aim will be to incubate ideas and early-stage startups in these 3 areas of CivicTech, Property Tech and Legal Tech.”
COVID-19 pandemic has upended the status quo globally specifically in services that rely on state-citizen interaction. How are these challenges becoming addressed in terms of digitization, open digital ecosystems?
India had fortunately embarked on a considerably-required path of digitization more than the last decade. The pandemic clearly showed the added benefits of digital identity and digital banking rails in becoming capable to provide relief straight to citizens across the nation. This digital ecosystem wants to expand its attain and depth, extending to sectors that have so far not benefited from technologies and to men and women who are as but excluded from our digital society.
Since, urban governance and citizen engagement is an location of focus for ONI, how do you see this space evolving additional in a way which incentivizes entrepreneurs working in these locations as properly as investors across the board.
Cities are the drivers of any economy and therefore we at ONI think that entrepreneurship in the space of urban governance and citizen engagement can have a transformative effect. This presently is a nascent space for philanthropic and investment firms. We have made this space one of our priority locations for 2021.
Our selection to focus on CivicTech is based on 2/3 principles: for starters, cities themselves are adopting tech backbones and most urban citizens are digitally equipped. Secondly, Covid has brought into focus essential locations associated to the future of cities, for e.g. superior focus on civic services, climate resilience and so forth. This creates a pretty exciting space and momentum for entrepreneurs to operate in- the potential to digitize their offerings as properly as the potential to engage the demand side.
A mixture of some of these things can genuinely drive deep-rooted and inclusive urban adjust. For this space to genuinely take-off, investors will want to invest in begin-ups mainly believing in their immense intrinsic worth for the future and their huge effect footprint in addition to their economics. Policy and regulations will also want to help entrepreneurs and begin-ups in this field to create a holistic and desirable ecosystem.
How crucial is citizen engagement and a participative method across all relevant stakeholders to make inclusive and equal cities? How can these interactions be additional institutionalized and streamlined?
Citizenengagement is the foundational stone of all democratic processes. Technology can aid make it simpler for citizens to attain civic services more rapidly and less costly. It can also be valuable in discovering out exactly where there are gaps that want to be filled.
What are some of the learnings that have come up for the duration of the pandemic in terms of their inclusivity, sustainability and resilience? How are these challenges becoming addressed by the innovators and entrepreneurs?
For a nation as huge and complicated as India, there are numerous locations to focus on as we move towards complete inclusivity. There will want to be a powerful and committed push towards enabling digital identity, as properly as enabling access by means of each digital and phygital indicates.
Why do you assume this space of CivicTech, PropertyTech and LegalTech have not been obtaining the requisite push in the ecosystem thinking of how crucial these difficulties are?
These sectors have been largely spaces with huge governmental presence and therefore it has been difficult for entrepreneurs to create sustainable business enterprise models. Also, most of them have been B2G models and not truly capable to tap into the wants of private organizations or customers. This made a huge quantity of them dependent on philanthropic donations. In civic tech, for instance, considerably of the funding that these 400-odd civic-tech Indian startups have received is philanthropic in nature.
These sectors have the possible to make substantial adjust in the lives of ordinary citizens.
We want to redefine how innovation and entrepreneurship has been approached in these sectors.