This month has been both exciting and exhausting. The excitement came from the Prajaseva Department reaching out to us. The day-to-day work is increasingly draining, and often feels like swimming upstream: every request meets resistance and takes enormous patience to see through.

First steps with the Prajaseva Department

The Prajaseva Dept. approached us to explore working together on improving how citizen services are delivered.Prajaseva is a new Department created by the Government of Karnataka in June 2026 that brings together the Public Grievances Division, the Administrative Reforms Wing and the Sakala Mission. We are thrilled – two and a half years of steady work has built us a reputation that has reached the people who run these services.

To kick off discussions, we asked for sample data on public grievances and sent them a discussion note, based on that data, proposing a pilot.

Our approach: fewer grievances

We are approaching the problem with a view to reducing grievances in the first place, while also looking at genuine resolution, not just closing tickets.

We tried to impress upon the officials that citizen service delivery is not a problem you can solve by throwing people or money at it (it appeared they agreed). It needs people who care about solving the citizen’s problem, not people gaming ticket-closure metrics.

Based on our conversations with government officials over the years, we understand that the State has little incentive to prevent grievances proactively. Success tends to be measured by complaints resolved. That culture is hard to change quickly, and this is where citizens with related skills and a commitment to giving their time can help

We are meeting the Dept. again later this week. We’ll keep you posted.

BDA Possession Certificate: revisiting decisions & mocking up the application form

We are actively working with the EDCS team to implement the changes BDA approved. Along the way we are having to revisit some of the decisions we made.

For example, we agreed with BDA officials and DEOs that case workers would enter the details citizens tend to get wrong, such as whether a site is odd or even. We are now wondering whether this makes sense, because it puts a lot of power in the hands of DEOs and case workers. We also agreed to add dropdowns for layout, village name, hobli and taluk, but it turns out the “masters”, a clean mapping of layouts to hoblis, taluks and villages, do not exist in the records.

Form design: trying to get access to the form builder

On the form design front, we want to try different ways of laying out the form, and see which ones help citizens fill it in with fewer mistakes. We requested a “dummy login” access to the application form builder so we could design the form ourselves, for instance with line breaks and questions placed side by side instead of one below the other. The resistance to this idea is completely understandable, so we are sitting with the developer and asking them to make the design changes as we create each mockup. This takes a lot of the developer’s time and patience, and every iteration means another deployment, so we want to keep the iterations to a minimum.

Understanding the Service Plus framework with NIC

We have also been in touch with the National Informatics Centre (NIC) in New Delhi, who developed the ServicePlus framework, to understand its limitations and make the most of its features. Our sincere thanks to Mr. Sreejith N.P., Director, NIC, for his generous time and to Mr. Deepak Misra, former Deputy Director General, NIC, for facilitating the introduction.

More soon! Wish us luck! 🙂