A Simple and powerful Smart City Solution: Grievance Management
Tags: Smart Cities, Smart Community, Grievance, Mobile Apps

What strikes first when you hear the word Smart City? Hi-Fi sensors? Fancy dashboards? Motion and Sound sensing cameras? This also strikes a lot of investment and high maintenance!

Every city is different. Its priorities are different as per the socio-economic and geographical factors of the city. But the common goal of every city is to improve the operations across the city. A simple definition of a Smart city is a city with improved operations. How about making the city smart by improving the operations with less investment?

To improve the city operations, the city administration needs to have information on the issues faced by the common man of the city and address the issues on time. How easily can this be achieved?

A spider builds its web to trap its prey. The moment a prey gets trapped in the web, it tries to escape, and the spider gets informed about the prey by the vibrations of the web. Isn’t this the most efficient information system?

A simple way for a city administration to keep informed about every issue in the city is to replicate this strategy and build an informative web across the city.

The informers may not be the electronic sensors always. A simple grievance reporting mobile application in the citizen’s hands can be an informer. Of course, this is already in place in most of the cities but how effectively is it used? What efforts are genuinely put to make this work? What can we do to make this work? How can we make the common man use the app?

Let us focus on how to make the solution effective. The app needs to meet certain standards to make maximum citizens trust and use it.

What makes a citizen uninstall an app?

· Complicated experience to use.

· High memory consumption. The heavier the app the lesser the possibility to have it installed.

· High battery consumption. The more the consumption the lesser the possibility to have it installed.

**** Address these concerns. Keep the app light!

What encourages the user to use the app and post a grievance?

· A simple interaction like Google Search.

· Available in English as well as mother tongue.

· A two-way communication.

· A reward system.

**** Make it simple to use with no clutter, report back to the user when the issue is addressed and reward the user with some redeemable points (can be redeemed while buying any item in the local stores) for a genuine post. Award the star citizens and encourage the participation.

When can the city administration think they have successfully established the communication web?

When they can address the reported grievance and the root cause by getting the analytics such as the following from the grievance data collected,

· How efficient the garbage pick-up is working in different areas of the city?

· Which area is reporting high number of streetlight malfunctioning?

· Which part of the city has more chain snatching events reported?

· Which part of the city has reported more eve teasing cases?

· Which road is reported to have more potholes?

· Which area had reported more drainage overflowing cases?

· Which bus stop has less frequency of the bus service?

· How long is it taking to address a grievance reported?

… and so on.

Establishing this communicating web and acting on the data is the first baby step to make the city operations efficient. Once the system gets the rhythm, the sensors and other high-end devices can be more meaningfully established.