“Kisi ko jaante ho?”
Do you know someone? When something goes wrong with the government in India, that is the first question we ask. Before we ask what the rule says, we ask who can make a call.
Your father's pension stops. The land record carries the wrong name. The hospital says there is no bed. The transformer has been dead for a week. There is a rule for each of these things, and an officer our taxes pay to carry it out. But the family sits down and makes a list of contacts. A cousin in the department. A friend's uncle close to the corporator or the sarpanch. Somebody who can make a call.
We do this so automatically that we've stopped noticing how strange it is. The rule is written down. The officer is paid. But what moves the file is a phone call from someone who matters.
If you don't know someone, you learn the other vocabulary. Kal aana. Sahab seat par nahi hain. Ho jayega. You stand at a counter, waiting for someone to look up. You come back tomorrow. You say "sir" to a person whose salary you pay. You fold your hands for something that was already yours. And when you cannot wait any longer, you find the agent outside the gate and pay. It isn't a fee. It's a ransom for your own right.
Then the MLA's assistant calls. The officer who was not in the seat is in it. The file that could not be found is found. Nobody became a better person in ten minutes. Ignoring that caller would cost something: a transfer, a word to the boss, trouble. The office knows it.
Ignoring you costs nothing. That is the whole problem.
There is one time when that changes. You know when. The road gets tarred. The water tanker turns up. The leader comes to your door. It is the month before an election. For those few weeks, you are expensive to ignore. Then you vote. The leader leaves, and the price of ignoring you falls back to zero for five years.
An officer does arithmetic all day. More files than hours. Some have someone behind them; some have no one. The first get done. The others wait. One of the files waiting is a widow's pension. To the office, it is another file. To her, it is the money she lives on.
And it isn't only delay. A road is billed twice and built once, and we pay both bills. Medicines are bought on paper. A teacher is paid and never comes. The ration is weighed short. Our money leaves our pockets. The road, the medicine, the lesson, the food never arrives as it should. Somebody is taking the difference. They don't have to hide very hard. The people they take it from are alone.
Ask why someone's work didn't get done and you hear the same answer: no approach, no source, nobody behind me. We all know what that means. We have learned to live with it. Yahan aisa hi hota hai. Kuch nahi badlega. That shrug is the most dependable thing the system has.
So we keep being handed new ways to complain: a portal, a helpline, an app, a grievance cell. Each is a new door into the same room. A complaint with nobody behind it is still a file with nobody behind it. Yours comes back marked "closed". You open it, read the word, and look outside. The problem is still there.
The real question isn't how to complain. It's how to become expensive to ignore.
There have only ever been two ways. One is to be important, or to know someone who is. The other is to unite, and to stay united.
The people who take your money already understand this. The contractor, the officer who signs for the contractor, the leader who protects them both: they act together. They are organized. We meet them one at a time. That is the difference, and it is the one thing we can change.
We saw this year what happens when we do. In May, students came out over a leaked national exam. Ten weeks later a Union minister had resigned. A protest takes the cost of ignoring people from zero to unbearable, almost overnight.
But people have jobs and exams and children. They cannot stay on the street forever. They go home, and the cost falls back to zero. Within a month of that resignation, the same students were planning another march, because what they had been promised had not been done. They won a promise. Nobody was left to collect it.
And you can't fill a maidan for every pothole. Most of what wears you down is small: the drain, the water that comes for one hour, the dead streetlight, the certificate, the bill that is wrong every month. Small enough to ignore. Large enough to shape your day, every day. These things are most of your life, and the cost of ignoring them stays at zero.
We need a way to stay united without living on the street. Imagine what that could look like.
The road outside your house was relaid last winter. By July it is craters. You complain. Ho jayega. Your neighbour complains. Ho jayega. Two people, two complaints, each alone.
Now suppose you could see what the office sees. Forty other roads in your city broke in the same monsoon. On every one, people are asking your question. Eleven were built by the same firm. The records show what it was paid, with our money, and the same engineer who signed that each road was satisfactory. The contract says the firm must repair them at its own cost for a year or more after building them. You had been asking for a favour. It was already owed.
Those forty lanes become one demand on the desk of the officer who can order the repair. The contracts are attached. So are the payments, the certificates and the names. These eleven roads. Rebuilt by this firm, at its own cost, by this date. Below that is what happens if the date passes: the officer's superior, the auditor, the court and the newspapers, in that order. The same papers go with it every time.
Sit in that officer's chair for a moment. Four thousand families are behind this file, and they have found each other. The papers cannot be lost; everyone has them. Your name is beside a deadline the whole city can see. For the first time, protecting the firm is more dangerous than making it work.
Now picture the crews coming out that week. They work at night. The people who heard ho jayega for a year stand at their gates and watch the road being laid properly, by the firm our taxes had already paid once.
Nobody shouted. Nobody begged. Nobody paid.
That is one city and one department. A broken scheme, an exam or a pension takes people across many districts. A national question takes lakhs, and lawyers, and patience. Whether a voter list was changed fairly is one of those, and today no citizen can check that for themselves. The higher you go, the harder they push back, and the more of us it takes. But the essentials remain: people who have found each other, a record with names and dates, and a demand that stays alive after everyone goes home.
The people we elect face a check once in five years. The people we pay work without that check. We need one that runs every day, at every level, in the hands of the people affected.
It doesn't exist yet because organizing is tedious. Find the others. Agree on one demand. Dig out the records. Remember, six months later, who promised what. Do all of this while earning a living and bringing up children. People with full lives cannot keep carrying it.
But tedious, exact, never-forgetting work is what software is for. We've used it for everything else. In fifteen years India built public systems for identity, for payments, for tax. Those systems did not make anyone more honest. They made it impossible to say the money never came. A promise, a deadline, a file has no equivalent. A citizen asking the state a question still runs on "kisi ko jaante ho?"
So we're building it: a free, open tool that carries the tedious part. It finds the other people with your problem. It helps you settle on one demand and find the officer who can sign it. It keeps the record: what was asked, of whom, by what date, and what they said. It remembers the date so nobody has to. It joins twenty neighbourhoods into one demand. It takes the names from the records—the contractor, the engineer, the officer and whoever sits above them—and keeps them in front of the people affected. People behave differently when their neighbours can see what they signed.
Offices know how to drown in complaints. The point is fewer demands, each with people behind it.
I expect it to work for the same reason the phone call works. The MLA's assistant almost never has to call twice. Once an office knows that a group is expensive to ignore, the work gets done the first time. Most of the time nobody will have to escalate anything. The officer sees the people behind the file, the name and the date, and does the arithmetic. Nobody has become a better person. For once, the fear runs the other way. And if the file is ignored anyway, the people are already together, with the record in their hands.
There is a small experiment from Delhi that shows it. People living in slums applied for ration cards. Most who simply applied and waited were still waiting a year later. Those who paid a bribe got their card. Those who filed a right-to-information request asking what had happened to their application got it almost as reliably. They threatened no one. They showed that somebody was watching and would remember.
Who is behind this? Right now, one person. An ordinary Indian, from Varanasi of all places. You have never heard of me, and that should not matter. Something like this must not depend on one person. It must not belong to one.
Everything is public from the first day: the code, the rules, every decision. Anyone can read it and run their own copy, so nobody can quietly change what it does or switch it off.
I am setting up a non-profit to hold it. Its rules will not let any one person or organization control it, me included. It will take no money from any political party. Every rupee received and every rupee spent will be published. The tool will cost you nothing to use. It is cheap to run. The non-profit will cover the cost from small donations, published in full. It will run on servers spread across many hands, so no single organization controls it, ours included.
There is nothing in it for elections. The officer who fixes the problem gets the credit, by name, whichever party runs the government. Honest officers exist. They should stop being the ones who lose.
It isn't built yet. What exists is the design, the rules and the first pieces. So I am asking for two things.
Tell us you want it. Leave a way to reach you, and nothing else: no address, no ID, no details of your problem. When it is ready for your city, we will write to you. The more of us waiting, the harder it will be to ignore on the day it arrives.
Help us build it, with whatever you are good at. Code, law, design, translation, video, social media, or knowing your city and the people in it. This needs all of them. Tell us what you can do. We will find the place for it.
I am not asking for your money. I am not asking for your vote.
I am asking for one more thing, and it costs nothing. Send this to one person who has stood at that counter.
For as long as anyone can remember, "kisi ko jaante ho?" has decided who gets water and who waits. The answer has always been somebody else's name. A person powerful enough to make the call.
It should be: haan. Ek doosre ko.
Yes. Each other.