Developed as part of the Building a Resilient Bengaluru Campaign, the citizen audit tool is a participatory instrument that enables citizens to contribute on-ground observations about the city’s stormwater drains. This tool aims to enhance public awareness regarding the state of stormwater infrastructure and to help establish the city’s first crowdsourced database of stormwater drains.
Bengaluru’s stormwater network comprises 842 km of rajakaluves (or stormwater drains) forming the city’s largest public water infrastructure. They play a critical role in flood management, public health, urban ecology, and water quality. Yet, they are largely neglected and hidden from the public eye. The citizen audit tool brings the rajakaluves back into public view, with the goal of increasing transparency and enabling stewardship of these public assets and to inform future local action.
Project
Citizen Audit Tool for Stormwater Drains
Year
2025
Supported By
Bengaluru Sustainability Forum: Small Grants Programme
What We Did
Research, Toolkit Design, Communication, Public Engagement
Status
Completed
The Larger Idea – Uncovering Hidden Infrastructure
Bengaluru’s stormwater drains remain under considerable stress. Hidden from view behind high walls, choking in debris and sewage, often encroached and improperly maintained, they have a reduced capacity to carry rainwater resulting in worsening flood events. Information about these issues remains largely undocumented, unreliable, and incomplete, allowing little accountability or meaningful change.
The Citizen Audit Tool is designed to address this gap by capturing hyperlocal, qualitative data that institutional databases often lack, bringing the rajakaluves back into public view and enabling community stewardship of these critical assets.
From Ground to Dashboard – How the Tool Works
The tool hosts a specialised set of forms on KoboToolbox, an open-source platform. Accessed via the ODK Collect mobile application, these forms enable observational and visual data collection on ground with all observations geotagged in real-time. Once submitted, the data feeds into an online stormwater dashboard, building the city’s first crowdsourced database of stormwater drains.
Citizens audit stormwater drains by going on-ground, documenting conditions across parameters such as the physical infrastructure, water quality, solid waste accumulation, flood history, maintenance patterns and public health, the last few gathered through community interviews.
Reading a Drain – The Audit Protocol
The audit protocol covers three distinct dimensions of drain health:
Physical Infrastructure and adjoining utilities: Participants document retaining wall condition, classify bridge types, and map utility conflicts — such as electricity lines and manholes inside drains — which signal overlapping governance responsibilities.
Water Quality and Waste Characterization: Participants identify drain inlets, categorise water color, turbidity and odour and classify solid waste inside and outside the SWD. Community markers like murals or benches are noted as indicators of local stewardship.o.
Flood History, Maintenance and Public Health: Based on resident interviews, this form records recent flood events, flood severity, maintenance frequency and prevalence of diseases in the neighbourhood.
Supporting the Auditor – Citizen Audit Guide
A Citizen Audit Guidebook was developed alongside The Citizen Audit Tool, a practical toolkit designed to maintain the quality of crowdsourced data while keeping participation accessible. Since stormwater drains vary widely in character, the guide helps auditors understand what to observe for each parameter, how to record it accurately and to keep data comparable across multiple teams, through curated reference photographs, colour-coded formats, and a shared visual language. The guide serves as a standalone resource for anyone who wishes to conduct an audit, independent of formal training.
Data, Design and the Possibility of Change
By putting structured, meaningful data collection in the hands of citizens, the tool works to fill the data gap using on-ground reality. Underpinning this is a deliberate design choice: to make participation as accessible and rigorous as possible. From the open-source platforms and geotagged forms to the accompanying audit guide, every element of the tool was built to lower the barrier to entry while maintaining the integrity of the data collected. The data thus gathered has the potential to inform targeted interventions, support policy conversations, and build a lasting record of Bengaluru’s rajakaluves, and ultimately cultivate an informed and engaged citizenry.
