Where Ideas Meet Action
I was still processing the headline when Zibi Jamal of Whitefield Rising, a non-profit citizens' group working to improve the liveability in the neighbourhood of Whitefield, east of Bengaluru, sent me a text in the morning. "Incredible, ten years later it's approved".
The link to the article was floating around in the WhatsApp groups that were a part of the movement set off by four people from Praja ten years ago. The memories of the campaign came back to me as I was reading the article.
In 2007, my work trips took me to cities across Europe. Cities like Stockholm, Copenhagen, Zurich, Amsterdam, Helsinki. They all had one thing in common: infrastructure which respected people over vehicles. Public transport was frequent and accessible; the streets were friendly to people who walked and rode bicycles. Like many others in India, I wondered, why don't we have infrastructure like this?
I used to frequent the internet looking for what was happening back home in Bengaluru, where I had grown up. I spent my early years playing under the giant Gulmohar trees in Malleshwaram. I used to live right opposite the Malleshwaram railway station, that hosted a million sparrows and ran a few trains in a day. We would run up to the platform to collect pods from the large trees and wait for the train to pass by, choosing to cross the tracks rather than use the bridge. The fascination with trains would come back years later.
The Internet would throw up road-building projects in Bengaluru. "Magic boxes" were the fad; the then City Commissioner, S. Subramanya, had hit upon the idea of constructing underpasses in a day. I wasn't sure if the moniker "magic" referred to their ability to solve traffic problems or create new ones. Among the many sites that provided news, one site called praja.in, particularly caught my fancy.
Praja.in was an online blogging platform and community created by three people: Pranav Jha, Narasimha Shastri, and Vadiraj Hombal. They worked in Bengaluru's booming software industry. Praja.in site members would post opinions, facts, and news about urban civic issues, and invite community dialogue. Facebook and Twitter weren't as popular as blogs back then. Blogs encouraged long-form content, suited for deeper discussion and analysis.
I created an account under the pseudonym of idontspam; some would refer to me as IDS for short. I started commenting on threads and creating new threads of discussion. Technology enabled a level of interaction that was not possible earlier. Discussions on the platform were a productive exchange of ideas. I connected with a range of people on issues that were plaguing our urban fabric.
Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP), now called the Greater Bengaluru Authority (GBA) and split into 5 different corporations, was the City Corporation or Urban Local Body of Bengaluru. The government set it up under the Karnataka Municipal Act and Rules of 1964 and 1976 to administer the city of Bengaluru. The BBMP builds and maintains the road and drain infrastructure among many others. They also provide building sanctions as per the rules in the Act. They are the first line of basic infrastructure provisioning for the city. But they don't plan, own, or operate public transportation services.
Bengaluru was growing fast. The post-liberalisation Information Technology industry was booming. The technology companies collectively labelled as "IT industry" were adding people by the thousands. Many of the people working in and joining these companies had travelled outside the country, mostly to the United States of America. The two biggest aspirations of Indians are to be part of a film and to own a car. With the rise in the middle class and increasing prosperity, the car-based culture of transport quickly became a replicable benchmark when they came back to their homeland.
The number of vehicles in Bangalore skyrocketed from just three lakhs in 1985 to forty lakhs in 2011. Traffic congestion became a hot topic on Praja.in. Many months of conversations revolved around public transportation systems across the world. The economy was booming despite the financial crisis of 2007-2008 caused by subprime lending. The repercussions were being felt across the globe. It did not, however, seem to dampen public transport infrastructure development in Bengaluru.
The discussions on Praja formed a perfect case study of how internet platforms can shape public discourse and civic action. The National University of Singapore later published a paper highlighting Praja's effect on the city's civic ecosystem. The online discussions were of high quality. They caught the attention of certain government officials who were following our conversations.
The enthusiasm soon spilled over offline. One of our first engagements with Bengaluru's public bus service company, the Bangalore Metropolitan Transportation Corporation (BMTC), happened in late 2009.
Jenny Pinto had walked away from a lucrative media career in Mumbai to do something that mattered. She landed in Bengaluru looking for collaborators, people who shared her restlessness, her belief that conversations shouldn't stay in boardrooms and living rooms but needed to reach the streets.
She found Praja.
Jenny understood something the rest of us were still learning: online discussions don't change cities. People do. And people need to meet, argue, and build trust face-to-face. She pushed us, sometimes dragged us, toward the offline world.
"We need an anchor," she insisted. "Something that gives us credibility beyond a website."
That anchor turned out to be Prof. T.G. Sitharam.
As Chairperson of CiSTUP at the Indian Institute of Science, Prof. Sitharam had a mile-long list of credentials: Senior Professor of Civil Engineering, internationally recognised researcher, awards that would fill a wall. You'd never know it from talking to him. He treated our ragtag group of citizen-advocates with the same seriousness he'd give a visiting delegation. No condescension. No gatekeeping. Just genuine curiosity about what we were trying to build.
Jenny, along with Manjari, Syed, Rithesh, Neha, and others from Praja, crafted an event called "Mobilicity", a platform to bring citizens, officials, and academics into the same room.
Prof. Sitharam didn't just agree to host it. He became a partner.
Over two hundred people attended Mobilicity, including a couple of elected representatives, officials from various departments, and many active citizens, and spoke passionately about transportation issues. The academia saw citizen groups outside their campus in a more positive light. The bureaucrats realised that all engagements with the people and civil society need not be as a protest. It helped cement constructive debate and engagement between stakeholder groups that had often dismissed or been at odds with each other.
One major outcome of Mobilicity 2009 was the opportunity to work with BMTC on one of the first citizen-led campaigns in the city, called "Bus Day".
The Bus Day campaign aimed to promote the use of the Volvo bus services that BMTC was deploying. Being relatively expensive in fare, it needed a different audience and strategy. Praja used this opportunity to push public transport among the IT crowd. One of the few buses, other than the Airport route, that became a success was the 335 series, which served the IT corridor to Whitefield.
The Bus Day campaign taught us something unexpected: government agencies don't change because you ask them to. They change when they see the benefit.
BMTC's website had been a static, corporate affair: timetables buried in PDFs, no route planning, no real-time information. Through months of collaboration, we nudged them toward something more citizen-friendly. It wasn't dramatic. It wasn't fast. But it happened. We learned that change inside government entities comes slowly, through relationship-building rather than confrontation.
But Mobilicity gave us something more valuable than a better bus website: it cemented our relationship with CiSTUP and Prof. Sitharam. That connection would prove essential the very next year, when we turned our attention to trains.
With the newfound momentum from the BMTC engagements offline, the platform continued to engage users on public transport topics online. The train, tram, and bus systems in Europe were a revelation to me. We began sharing knowledge and information about the various public transport options in those countries.
While researching information on commuter rail in March 2009, I made a tongue-in-cheek comment on a Praja thread, titled Commuter Rail System - For Us?:
"Are there any technical studies or recommendations on CRS for Bangalore? The only links I get lead back to Praja!!! Are we the only people talking about it?"
The thread had jump-started my curiosity and deeper research on commuter rail. However, Pranav had already reached out to Gaurav Gupta, who was heading the Bengaluru Metropolitan Land Transport Authority (BMLTA). During the conversation, he mentioned in passing the various tracks and stations that already existed for a suburban rail service. Pranav could not get this thought out of his mind on his drive home. He looked up Google Maps for all the stations around the city. He and a fellow blogger stumbled on the Comprehensive Traffic and Transport Plan (CTTP).
Karnataka Urban Infrastructure Development and Finance Corporation (KUIDFC) commissioned the CTTP in 2007. It made recommendations on various mode shares, including the Commuter Rail System. It identified ten segments of commuter railway service in the document for service rollout.
Some conversations on Praja identified this as a potential opportunity that no one in the Government was paying attention to. It would take a while for it to find its legs.
Seven of us from Praja set up an offline entity. The work of lobbying for projects offline was bringing new people who wanted to organise themselves better and represent themselves as a legal entity.
Brainstorming for a name, we had to understand what we stood for. The discussions in Praja had a solution angle to all problems. In fact, we used the word "Solutionism" in our elevator pitch for quite a while, even with bureaucrats. We just made it up to describe all the knowledge that existed on the platform.
I suggested that we use a new name to differentiate the offline entity from the web platform. All accepted my recommendation of Research, Analysis, and Advocacy Group for a name. We set Praja RAAG up as a society.
The bridging of the online and offline world was complete.
The platform brought ideas together, sometimes anonymously. But the offline world brought people together in real life, with all the warts and pimples in their ideologies and biases.
We had a platform. We had people. We had ideas.
What we didn't have was any understanding of what we were actually up against.
The system decides who belongs in the conversation before it evaluates what is being proposed. Build credibility through presence, professional output, and relationships before expecting your ideas to move anything. Permission to influence is earned, not assumed.