Hello!

I am Phani Kondeti, founder of Citijan, a socio-democratic platform for empowering E-Democracy. As we embark on this transformative journey, I will be documenting our experiences and struggles, the vision behind Citijan, the future we aspire to build, and intriguing social and civic case studies that may be of interest to you, in a series of blog posts. Please follow, stay connected and spread the word around!

Today's post is an endeavour to present the essence of Citijan. Citijan, in simple terms, is a platform for E-Democracy.

On 18th February, 2009, Committee of Ministers on Electronic Democracy (E-Democracy) of the Council of Europe recommended the member States to consider making use of the opportunities afforded by E-Democracy (Electronic Democracy) to strengthen democracy, democratic institutions and democratic processes.

If that sounded complex, let me try to simplify. Picture yourself standing in a polling booth on Election Day. You take pride in casting your vote, fulfilling your duty as a responsible citizen. But does that one-minute act every five years suffice to be an active participant in democracy?

Now, let's dive deeper. Among, say, seven out of ten citizens who actually vote, how many of us are making a rational, logical and informed choice in choosing our representatives? Do we have available, accessible, unbiased, citizen-friendly information, that will help us in making that choice? Let's suppose such information is readily available, how many of us will even bother to go through that information before casting our vote? I will leave the answers to the readers' wisdom.

It's disheartening to realize that not many even perceive this as an issue, and that's the crux of the problem!

Being a citizen entitles certain rights, but also mandates certain responsibilities.

Unfortunately, not many of us are paying enough attention to the fundamental responsibility of choosing our own representative.

Here, it's extremely important to emphasize that we must not fall into the trap of equating democracy to elections. Voting is merely one aspect of the many facets of democracy. Governance, administration, legislation, social justice, distributive justice, grievance redressal and many more are equally part of democracy. Unfortunately, majority of us do not have any means of making meaningful contributions in any of those vital democratic processes.

Citijan aims to tackle this fundamental problem of democracy by providing you a digital platform to express yourself and contribute meaningfully to democracy.

Over a period of time, for multitude of reasons, democracy, democratic institutions and democratic processes had significantly weakened, and as noted by the recommendations of the Council of Europe, E-Democracy offers a ray of hope to reverse the trend.

E-Democracy, in simple terms, is integration of technology into democracy.

E-Democracy is not a replacement, but instead, additional, complementary to, and interlinked with traditional democracy. Over the past two decades, there had been limited E-Democracy experiments worldwide, and not all of them had been successful. Social, economic and mostly political challenges are aplenty for E-Democracy!

We, at Citijan, aspire to embrace such challenges and obstacles as stepping stones to progress! As the World's largest democracy, by 2047, Indian democracy will transcend our wildest imaginations, and Citijan is determined to play a pivotal role in this monumental transformation. Citijan aims to catapult India to the forefront of E-Democracy.

We very well recognize that the daunting journey ahead will be impossible, if there is no support from others. Citijan is first and foremost a democratic experiment, and it's success will invariably depend on reaching the right people. We yearn to connect with like-minded individuals, esteemed lawyers, public policy enthusiasts, political science experts, civil society organizations, media personnel, and all those fervently invested in the democratic processes.

If you would like to help, just drop a mail at hello@citijan.in. Your support is invaluable to us. We are just a message away!

Stay tuned for next week's post - "The Blind Vision". We look forward to your continued engagement. I conclude this post by summarizing what drives Citijan -

Democracy can solve each and every problem of humanity and Citijan aspires to solve each and every problem of Democracy.

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