Facebook + Community Policing = Better Services

In the Indian capital of New Delhi, a tiny cohort of Internet savvy consumers is demanding better services from their government and is using social media to make it happen, even though the vast majority of the town’s residents remain off the Internet. The India growth story is a compelling narrative, after all what is not to like. A billion people on the march, eagerly embracing free market capitalism and delivering almost double digit GDP growth, a far cry from the not very complimentary Hindu rate of growth that they had been struggling with for decades. But like any good story, there is a seamy underbelly that doesn’t quite make it to the headlines…rampant corruption, crumbling infrastructure and a government that is failing to provide any notion of civic services to its people.

But India has one big thing going in its favor…the demographic dividend i.e. India has more than 50% of its population below the age of 25 and more than 65% hovers below the age of 35, a whole lot younger than US, China, Japan and other global powers. No surprise, the younger ones tend to be the most restless as well, and once tools like Facebook came along, it was only a matter of time before the public establishment began to feel the wrath of its people.

In mid 2010, Delhi Police went live with its Facebook pages and since then about 75,000 people have become fans. In Delhi there are about 6.5 Million vehicles, with only 5,000 traffic police officers available at any point in time, so the odds of not getting caught for any traffic violation are pretty good. The Facebook pages ended up becoming a classic case of “digital vigilantism” with harried consumers shooting pictures of errant drivers, wrongly parked vehicles and of policemen themselves who routinely ignore the very laws they are sworn to defending….all of which makes for a very interesting and volatile mix.

Precise records are hard to come by but by some local media estimates hundreds of tickets (called “challans” in Hindi) have been issued and the police have taken to using the Facebook pages as a way to update the citizenry about major initiatives etc, for e.g. updating information on traffic gridlocks during the high profile Commonwealth Games last year. It is indeed ironic that virtually al of the evidence posted by these highway whistleblowers is shot using mobile phone cameras/videos, which is an offense in and of itself.

Image courtesy of the author

The success of this venture has spawned several other government departments to start putting the Facebook lipstick on their own hogs, so to say. Clearly, the public relations opportunity was not lost on the bureaucrats running these departments. If nothing else, it has forced officialdom to think about things a bit differently.

The traditional force in Indian politics was the street demonstration (or “morcha”) and if the numbers were missing, the politicos basically ignored that attempt. But as the Internet population grows in India, for the average middle class guy sitting in a burlap cube in an office park in Anywhere, India, venting on Facebook presents a lot more viable alternative than participating in the good old morcha. Combine the more modern tools like social media with the more traditional tools like the India Right to Information Act of 2005 and the citizenry of modern India yet has a fighting chance to finally achieve its own pursuit of happiness.