Zen Citizen: An effort towards clearer, bribe-free government processes

 

Last month I wrote about my volunteering project with Zen Citizen on translating the death registration form into plain English. This form gave me a chance to work closely with the founder of Zen Citizen, Vineeta Kommineni. Today's post features Vineeta and her organization and takes a look at their work from a plain language perspective. 

Founded close to two years ago, Zen Citizen is a volunteer-driven initiative that explains procedures in simple language and shares hacks/workarounds and undocumented information to help citizens independently apply for services. 

When Vineeta’s father passed away, she visited government offices many times to get documentation done. Each time she would be turned away by the staff asking for some or the other missing detail or document. The intent was clear: to wear her out enough to push her into paying a bribe. 

It didn’t really work that way. Eventually, Zen Citizen happened. While the core idea behind Zen Citizen is to empower citizens to access government services easily and on their own, the deeper goal is to fight against corruption, Vineeta told me in a telephonic interview. 

“Why should a citizen take the help of even middlemen to exercise their rights? Often the middlemen’s fee covers the bribe,” Vineeta said. 

The struggle for information is real in India. Finding out the police station, revenue district, or municipal ward your house is a part of should be just a few clicks away in this day and age. But it isn’t. One of Zen Citizen’s initial projects, Civic Compass, solved this for the residents of Bengaluru.  

Other tools Vineeta’s team have built are Kaveri Village Finder that helps you locate your property within the revenue department’s maps and Kaveri Image Resizer, a nifty way to resize photos for marriage certificate applications. These tools are workarounds for buggy government websites that frustrate and slow down users. 

Plain language in Zen Citizen’s work

“It isn’t enough to say file an affidavit. It needs to be explained in plain language. And in the absence of such information, Zen Citizen comes in. What’re the different ways in which something can be misunderstood? We must look at all that.

“Writing in plain language is not difficult. The hard part is caring enough about the user to do it,” Vineeta said.

Her current work with Seva Sindhu is to translate government forms into plain English. It’s a portal that hundreds of thousands of people visit everyday to avail of services such as birth or death certificate, police verification certificate, bus passes, and so on. “We are currently working only on the text and not doing any changes in the backend or redesigning the UX as that’s a safe, low-friction place to begin,” she informed me.

But plain language often goes deeper than text: it is about design and, as earlier noted, about empathy – aka getting into the user’s shoes. So I asked Vineeta what her approach would be if a change needs to go deeper than the text level. Take, for instance, the language field in the death registration form. Getting clarity on how to fill this field is not simply about editing the text or providing an explanatory note – see my post on this last month. This one field is enough to show that the form was not designed in a user-first way. 

To this, Vineeta replied, “We started with writing guides to help citizens navigate dysfunctional systems with less frustration. Our goal was to make the best of the situation. We did not want to fight the system or try to convince the government to change its processes—that felt like a battle for another day.” 

Fair enough. One must choose their battles and Zen Citizen has chosen theirs. Plain language is, of course, central to any work that strives to bring clarity to government processes. One does start with the text, but usually the work grows beyond it.

Translating the death registration form into plain English

 

I worked on the death registration form as a volunteer for Zen Citizen. I'd have liked to use some screenshots but the login is very buggy and I could not get into the Seva Sindhu portal once I completed the project. So, here’re some text-only highlights: 

Preferred language: This is a field at the beginning of the form. At first, it seems like an innocent enough query. But look at it more deeply and it can unhinge the entire form. By preferred language, what is the government asking? Is it the preferred language in which I want to fill the form? Or, is it the preferred language in which I want the Death Registration certificate to be provided? 

I selected English and proceeded to the subsequent fields. However, the language preference continued to haunt me. Further below in the form, it asks for the deceased’s name in Kannada. This on an English form. What happens if I am not a Kannada-speaking person? Of course, you can always use transliterating tools to input the name in Kannada, but how do I verify if it’s a correct reproduction of my name? 

The converse is even more problematic: that is, being asked to type the name in English when I have chosen Kannada as my language for the form. In English, one’s name can be spelled in so many ways. How do you verify if it’s correct if you don’t know English? This can result in a critical failure because if the certificate spells your name wrong, it’s a dud. None of the government agencies will accept it and getting it corrected is a lifetime’s work. 

Ration card: The form assumes everyone has a ration card! How did this come to be? If you don’t have a ration card, you cannot even begin with the form as the name of the deceased is automatically populated from the ration card. 

Date & time of death: The time selection menu progresses by the minute. This can be very tedious to navigate to the exact hour and minute. Providing a time selection menu like we use to set alarms in mobile phones shouldn’t be too difficult. The other question is why the time of death is relevant, unless we are investigating homicide. 

We also looked at the necessity of some of the data being collected – like the age of the deceased’s spouse. We are waiting to hear from Seva Sindhu on this and other queries. 

My learnings from this project as of now

• The form is not designed from the user’s perspective. It seems to primarily solve things for the government agency rather than the citizen.  
• It works on many assumptions -- that someone typing in English also knows how to type their name in Kannada; that everyone has a ration card; that if they cannot figure out something, they can always avail the services of a broker. 
• The form does not seem to be tested with users. Else, some of the things I highlighted here may have caught the eye of the form creators. 
• The form does not seem to take into cognizance the varied background of the users. Given that it’s a death registration form, it is applicable to everyone (!) and hence must be usable by everyone. 

The lacunae of this form are not unique to it. God knows, there are worse government forms out there. It is representative though and makes for a good beginning. Hope to be able to report positively on this project in the days to come.