About Samaaj Data

Our Purpose

Samaaj Data exists in service of citizens who choose to act.

When a person decides to fix the potholes on their street, map a garbage dump, or understand flooding in their neighbourhood, they need more than intent, they need data, community, and solutions.

Samaaj Data equips them with these essentials so that civic and climate action can begin anywhere, by anyone.

What We Do

We build and maintain the infrastructure that powers citizen-led problem solving:

1. Collect and crowdsource data on issues like waste, water, air, and mobility.
2. Design open tools that make data collection and storytelling simple, multilingual, and multimodal.
3. Connect people and organisations solving similar problems, across regions
4. Document and amplify local solutions, turning one neighbourhood’s learning into another’s starting point.

On Samaaj Data, information becomes living knowledge - maps, narratives, and dashboards that communities can see, question, and act on.

How We Work

Samaaj Data is collaborative by design. Grassroots organisations contribute their experience. Citizens add local observations that make invisible realities visible. Public datasets offer a foundation we clean, layer, and place back within community contexts. Together, these form a shared evidence base that belongs to everyone, a commons that fuels everyday problem solving and systemic change.

Our Principles

Over the past year, we’ve learned that technology alone is not enough. Samaaj Data must live and breathe inside community life.

Here’s what guides us as we build forward:

1. Community is our moat. Not everyone will solve problems, and fewer still will care about data — but for those who do, we exist entirely in service of them. Everything we build must flow back to the citizens who act.
2. Wikipedia, not Encyclopedia. We embrace imperfection and incompleteness. We publish drafts, invite contributions, and treat civic data as a living, evolving resource.
3. Amplification over storage. Data matters only when it sparks participation. Every dataset should become a story, a gathering, or a provocation for action.
4. Relational, not transactional. Citizens, technologists, and CSOs are not “users.” They are contributors, peers, and co-creators in a shared ecosystem.
5. Build in public. There is no pre-existing demand for this work, we are creating it by being open, transparent, and experimental. Every release, dataset, and story is an invitation to shape the commons with us.

Our Roots

Samaaj Data is an initiative of Reap Benefit, built out of a decade of changemaking by the Solve Ninja movement, young citizens who have mapped, audited, and improved their neighbourhoods across India.

It grows out of those thousands of small acts of problem solving — now woven into a national infrastructure for civic and climate action.

Our ambition is to evolve into a Citizen Data Lab for India, a living commons where data, stories, and community reinforce one another to make governance participatory and cities truly work for their people.