The final project for my Human and Social Systems class in fall 2013 at DSI was a group project consisting of research, mapping and designing a hypothetical intervention for an issue of our choice over the course of 5 weeks. Me and my group - Meghan Lazier, Akshata Malhotra, Xintong Liu, Pragya Mishra and Renzo P'erez-Acosta - wanted to focus on the small topic of corruption in India.
We all recognized how systemic and rampant corruption in India is, and the numbers revealed a sad story about how much the Indian economy is losing to this culture of corruption that is prevalant in every aspect of everyday life there.
We researched the origins of corruption in India, as well as the existing landscape of attempts to address it. We drew from the sources available to us and mapped out the system of corruption - the players, their interactions and relationships, and feedback loops.
We realised that we were limited by the scale of the problem, constraints of time and distance, and the lack of transparency around business and government. We therefore decided to focus on a common specific transaction where corruption manifests, which involves the daily life of the average Indian citizen - the process of obtaining a driver's license.
With 2 team mates from India, we had access to first hand user experience of how the system works. To glean insights, it was important to map the actions, insights and motivations of three key players in the system: the license applicant, the government bureaucrat and the tout. By mapping this instance of corruption, we were able to understand where money flows, how time is impacted and what various options there are at each stage of the process.
Obtaining a driver's license in India is heavy in bureaucracy and time consuming, so many Indians choose to pay a bribe early on in the process to save time and money. Since the quality of the potential driver is not guaranteed due to bribery and dodging of standard testing, road safety cannot be ensured. As a group, we realized that the bribes are small and petty, and of course corrosive in their own way, but the real problem is that unskilled drivers are getting on the road and their reckless driving make India a world leader in automobile accidents. We identified a possible grave unintended consequence of corruption that is overlooked by most Indian citizens, and decided to design our theory of change around it.
To have an impactful leverage point, we wanted to identify a place where all of the stakeholders had interest or ownership. We realized that the small details and basic deliverables could have an extraordinary affect on people’s normal daily life. We decided to redesign the driving license in India as a vehicle to impact accountability and unintended consequences. We created a design proposal and a scenario map of how it would work in the field.
We acknowledged the gaps and limitations of the hypothetical design - issues of security and privacy, ownership and control of personal information by third parties, and opportunities for corruption in the new system. In order for this plan to achieve its goals, it needs to be supported by corruption blocking measures in other parts of the system, such as law enforcement and the judicial system.
