RAMESH RAMANATHAN Campaign Co-ordinator, Janaagraha

On a blustery Saturday morning in December, I am waiting for Ramesh Ramanathan in his modest first-floor office in a sleepy Bangalore borough. It's 9.00 a.m, early by Indian standards and Ramanathan is late. Not like a banker to keep someone waiting, I think to myself. 15 minutes later, a boyish-looking Ramanathan bounds in, making contrite noises about the wait. He's dressed in khakis, a half-sleeved shirt, yachting shoes-worn just the way they are supposed to be, minus the socks-and looks every inch a banker out for a weekend sailing excursion. References to banking aren't exactly out of place while describing the 40-year-old Ramanathan. Not very long ago, he was the Managing Director of Citibank's Equity Derivatives Business and was based in London. He was among the top 150 execs at the bank and had been singled out as potential CEO material. Then, he gave it all up.

For what? Threats of bodily harm? Accusations that he is trying to take over the city corporation from the outside? Calls for an investigation into his source of funds? The Citibank angle hasn't been exploited yet, but in a country where zealots often claim that American multinationals are out to ruin Indians, Indian culture, the health of the masses, Indian companies, and the Indian economy for personal gain, it's only a matter of time before someone does. Citibank, after all, is as American as Coca-Cola, McDonald's, and KFC.

The target of all this ire is the Non Governmental Organisation (NGO) Ramanathan and his wife Swati, an urban planner, founded. It is called Janaagraha, a coinage inspired by Mahatma Gandhi's Satyagraha movement: the name was suggested by Swati-like Gandhi, she hails from the state of Gujarat-and all she did was replace satya (truth, in most Indian languages) with janaa (people). The signage outside the NGO's office is minimalist, a series of stick figures spelling out J-a-n-a-a-g-r-a-h-a against a bright yellow background, strangely reminiscent of the dancing men who appear in an eponymous Sherlock Holmes adventure. The office itself is quiet although it is manned by a staff of 15, all volunteers, and receives a steady stream of visitors.

There's nothing understated about the flak Janaagraha has been catching of late. "Why is Janaagraha so interested in the affairs of Bangalore City Corporation (BCC)?" asks K. Chandrashekar, the city's former mayor and a Congress corporator. There's more of the same. "What is Ramesh Ramanathan's locus standi?" "BCC should register a complaint against Ramesh Ramanathan." Corporators owing allegiance to the Congress' main rival, the Bharatiya Janata Party, are equally splenetic. "We should not allow an outsider to hold the reins of administration," says BJP corporator B.S. Satyanarayana.

Potholes lie at the core of the controversy. The city corporation is responsible for the maintenance of, among other things, roads. For administrative purposes, most corporations break up the city into manageable units called wards; the maintenance work they carry out is termed ward works. Bangalore has 100 wards and Janaagraha provides the populace of each a platform to work with the corporation, question and understand how the ward works budget for their ward is being spent, and offer suggestions on how it can be better spent. "Accumulated garbage used to be a major problem," says A. Shiva Shankaran, the President of Hennur Road and Pillana Garden Residents Welfare Association. "Through Janaagraha, we were able to find a long-term solution to this." Then, after a pause and with not a little pride: "We know about our rights and duties." So, potholes, or people for potholes, it is, and City Hall does not like it.

Ramanathan's is a hybrid Horatio-Alger-meets-Gautama-the Buddha story, but the man himself prefers to use the idiom of wunderkind Bollywood director Aditya Chopra's Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge (To The Bravehearted Will Go The Bride) to explain his life. He was a student at the Birla Institute of Technology and Science (bits) in Pilani, one of India's best-known engineering schools. Swati was a student at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad. They were in love. "In true Bollywood style, both our families were opposed to the match," laughs Ramanathan. "So, I quit studies to marry her."

The year was 1987, and Ramanathan found himself a college dropout-not technically, he had one degree out of the two he was enrolled for at bits-with a wife to support. He started trading in steel and must have been good at it: soon, he was earning around Rs 30,000 a month, a lot of money in the late 1980s. The couple bought a car and a flat. They had arrived.

Something wasn't right, though. "It was Swati who pointed out that the vague feeling of uneasiness was an indication that I was intellectually vegetating," says Ramanathan. In 1989, he enrolled at Yale's MBA programme. Life was hell. He studied and tutored students, and Swati waited tables to make ends meet.

"In order that we do not become just another NGO, we have gone in for a people-up organisation, not a top-down one"

From Yale to Citibank was a logical next-step, then it was on to London, the derivatives business, and two children, Shunori and Rishab, now 12 and seven respectively. In 1998, for the third time in his life, Ramanathan did the renunciation thing. "Swati and I had promised ourselves that we would return (to India) after I made my half a million dollars and we had made several multiples that," laughs Ramanathan. Citibank was upset enough to fly a director in from New York to convince him to stay back but Ramanathan's mind was made up.

Like most other non resident Indians (NRIs), Ramanathan had flirted with the idea of returning home for some time. And like a few, he had wondered long and hard why a people who scripted success stories for themselves and their companies on the international stage ran a poor show back in India. "India is a siren call," says Ramanathan. "No Indian can ignore it." He realised there were two things he could do. Wallow in cynicism, or try and make a difference. "I chose the latter."

In November 1999, a Congress government, headed by Somanahalli Malliah Krishna, a 67-year-old lawyer came to power in Karnataka. Bangalore was then (as it is now), the software capital of the country, but rapid growth had resulted in a deterioration of the city's infrastructure: the roads were bad, the traffic worse, and the local development authority, nearly defunct. One of Krishna's first tasks was to create a Bangalore Agenda Task Force (BATF), and name Infosys CEO Nandan M. Nilekani to head it. BATF's mandate was to work with the city's administrative bodies and present a report on how things could be improved. In response, BATF came up with a solution (ongoing solution would be a better term, for it is still work-in-progress) that involved elements of consultation, where it would help administrative bodies improve process-efficiencies; evaluation, where these bodies would present their achievements over the previous six months, and plans for the following six; and corporate participation. That, though, is another story and one that has been chronicled (See BT, August 17, 2003).

The Ramanathans had returned to India in March 1998 and Ramesh had travelled around the country meeting with NGOs, bureaucrats, and others. That was enough to reinforce his conviction that the fundamental flaw with most local government bodies had to do with finance. Most corporations, as Ramanathan will tell anyone who cares to listen, do not even follow a double-entry book keeping system. The former banker was involved in creating a fund-based accounting system (think double-entry) for Tumkur, a small city in Southern Karnataka when he heard about BATF. He picked up the phone and called Nilekani.

It didn't take Ramanathan long to convince Nilekani and the other members of BATF (he himself became one in early 2000) that they could do worse than start by helping the local corporation implement a fund-based accounting system. By April 2001, this was in place, but Ramanathan wasn't satisfied. Information, such as the amount allotted to ward works, was now available but his suggestion that citizens participate in the process of deciding how this money would be best spent wasn't finding any takers. And so, in December 2001, he and Swati founded Janaagraha; the organisation is funded by the Ramanathan Foundation, set up by the couple, and has a corpus of Rs 2.5 crore. Soon after, across Bangalore's 100 wards, Janaagrahis, as the movement's volunteers call themselves, wrote to their corporators suggesting how the ward works budget for their areas could be used best; in 22 wards, corporators accepted the suggestions, and the revolution was on. Six months later, to insure that such information would always be available to people, Janaagraha and three other NGOs founded Public Record Of Operations Finance (proof), a right to information campaign that hopes to define the reporting standards for government performance. Janaagraha predates proof, but Ramanathan likes to call it an endgame, something that ensures that citizens will do something with the information that the government has to now make available to them.

That could explain the detailing that went into Janaagraha's launch. "It was almost as if we were launching a fast moving consumer goods brand," he says. There's Bala Janaagraha, a division that works with school children, Yuva Janaagraha, one that works with the youth, and Janaagraha Times, a fortnightly newspaper. And There's Citizen's Quotient (CQ), a fun-test Ramanathan administers to most people who visit his office. What's your ward number, he starts. Who is your corporator? (This writer failed.)

City Hall's dislike of Janaagraha stems from the fact that residents welfare associations and ward-level committees suddenly seem to have found their voice: they ask questions about projects and finances and keep a close eye on things. The criticism doesn't bother Ramanathan. "The very fact that politicians across parties are attacking Janaagraha is indication that we are doing something right," he says wryly, adding that every movement has to be ignored, sneered at, and attacked before it is accepted.

Ramesh and Swati Ramanathan believe they are creating a new Intellectual Property (IP) of democracy, something that the latter claims they "will give away as freeware to any city, any country" that wants to try something similar. "Janaagraha hasn't put in more than 2,00,000 man-hours to make some small changes here and there," Swati adds. "It is a personal spiritual journey." And an idea that could make the world a better place.