What a month we’ve had! 

Here are our key milestones and some reflections on our journey.

Soft Launch of ‘Ask Zen’ – our Gen AI Chatbot  

Volunteer Credits: Arpan Gupta (Kota, Rajasthan), Chandru (Chennai), Nikhil (Kochi), Priti Pandurangan (London), Renee (Seattle), Vijay (Trichy)

Our guides are packed with small but crucial details, which makes them long and overwhelming. So we built a chatbot to ease cognitive load on our citizens, by surfacing specific guidance only when needed.

‘Ask Zen’ is a Chrome extension that launches directly on Kaveri (Karnataka’s portal for property transactions, documentation, and marriage registration), enabling citizens to get answers without switching to the Zen Citizen website. It is a testament to our conviction that, as citizens, we can improve government service delivery, even without the authority or influence to modify official systems.

Currently, we answer questions on marriage registration. We chose this early-life, low-risk service to encourage users to return later for more complex tasks like property registration.

We’ve submitted the extension to the Chrome Web Store for review. Google typically completes the review in under a week. In the meantime, we’re demoing the tool on our local development environment 🙂

Here are a few screenshots

Proposing a Fairer Approach to the Sakala Marriage Certificate Timeline

Under Sakala, Karnataka’s implementation of the Right to Services Act, the mandated turnaround time for issuing a marriage certificate is 1 day – but this doesn’t reflect reality. Delays often occur between application submission and SRO approval, which must happen before payment is made and an acknowledgement number is generated and the Sakala clock begins. In many cases, SROs take several days to review applications, causing avoidable bottlenecks. 

We write that a more accurate and citizen-friendly approach could be to start the Sakala clock at the time of application submission, pause it once the file is approved and awaiting payment, and restart it when the citizen completes the payment. This would ensure accountability while excluding delays caused by the citizen. 

Explaining the Thinking Behind Our Work

This month, we shared more about our guiding principles:

We Are Not Anonymous, Just Low-Ego

One of our recent posts was removed by a subreddit moderator with the explanation: ‘This initiative lacks any real names associated with it, and there’s no information on your website about who is behind it.’  We explain that we’re simply choosing not to promote individuals on the site, and where necessary, we have no reservations about identifying ourselves.

Why We Don’t Name and Shame: A Different Way to Fight Corruption

We focus on working around broken systems – not through whistleblowing, policy advocacy, or protests. Others are doing this vital work. We’re just taking a different path.

Imagining How Zen Citizen Can Fail

We also conducted a pre-mortem for Zen Citizen, encouraged by our mentor Dr. Aniruddha Malpani – India’s IVF pioneer, Angel Investor, Microschooling Advocate, and Anti-Corruption activist (though not necessarily in that order). We identified burnout as the most significant risk and reflected on steps to mitigate it.

Onward & Upward!