Category: Journey
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Zen Update
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…
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Zen Update
The short The long BDA Possession Certificate: Now in Implementation Last month, after months of discussions and chasing down hard data to inform changes, we got BDA decision-makers on board for a complete overhaul of a decades-old citizen service: the Possession Certificate for Sites. This month, we “put up the file”, formally initiating the process…
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Zen Update – July ’26
TL;DR: After months of chasing data and analysing the process, we got BDA decision-makers on board for a complete overhaul of a decades-old citizen service. Now we’re waiting for the changes to go live on the Karnataka’s Seva Sindhu citizen services portal. Zen Citizen had previously uncovered the end-to-end issues in a BDA citizen service…
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Zen Update – May ’26
Something has shifted This month, Zen Citizen got the opportunity to walk into a room of people we had been building up to reach for months. And I dare say they bought into the vision. I also dare say that from this point on, access to people/data/systems will no longer be a significant challenge. I…
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Zen Updates – April ’26
Hello! 🙂 This has been another good month! 🙂 We worked with Seva Sindhu and BDA to simplify the Possession Certificate application process, and unexpectedly ended up re-designing the service itself; while reviewing BDA’s upcoming RTI portal, we successfully pushed for more citizen-centric design decisions; finally, while documenting government procedures, we discovered that processes are…
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Zen Updates – Feb ’26
Sometimes things stall. Sometimes they move, but don’t quite land. This month was different: things both moved and landed 🙂 There were challenges, but we’re getting a better grip on handling them, helped in no small part by having a strong champion in the BDA. On to the specifics now 🙂 BDA: eAuction portal update…
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When Bureaucracy Meets Resolve: Mohan’s Story
Just last Friday over lunch, I was explaining Zen Citizen’s two-fold approach to tackling petty corruption to a friend, A. The first part involves sharing a list of reasons officials often use to reject applications for government services. Some of these reasons are legitimate, while others are fabricated to prolong the process, making citizens weary…
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Marriage Registration: Gateway to Kaveri and First Gen AI Chatbot Use Case
This month, we’re building a browser extension that opens a Gen AI chatbot on the Kaveri portal to assist with marriage registration queries. Why start with Marriage Registration? We believe marriage registration is a strategic entry point and gateway service for citizens to start using the Kaveri portal. All of this helps build a habit…
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Pre-Mortem: Imagining How Zen Citizen Can Fail and What We Can Do to Prevent It
Scaling ambition: From helping a handful of people to igniting a movement When we started Zen Citizen, our goal was simple: to help a handful of people. By that definition, we’ve already succeeded; more people than we imagined have found support through our work. Our goal now is to ignite a movement. Our next step…
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Zen Updates – Mar ’25
Civic Compass: A Cross-Continental Effort You may have seen the prototype of Civic Compass that AN built to help citizens identify the right offices for essential services like electricity, water, ward offices, and police stations for their area. Abhik, Priti, Nishit, and Renee scaled this early version into a full-fledged tool. Please give it a…