CIVIC: Amplifying citizens' voice through AI-powered grievance redress systems

CIVIC: Amplifying Citizens' Voice through AI-Powered Grievance Redress Systems

Each month, millions of people across the globe raise concerns—road repairs, benefit delays, and service disruptions. These are real-time signals about what's working in governance and what's not. When systems are implemented to gather this feedback, it can provide governments with information to help guide responses and improve public services.

CIVIC: The Civil Society and Social Innovation Alliance is the World Bank's new global facility supporting civil society organizations (CSOs), social innovators, and social economy actors. Through its Digital Citizen Engagement platform, it connects citizens and institutions using technology.

However, mainstreaming digital citizen engagement requires long-term collaboration among practitioners and designers. This is why we at CIVIC launched the CIVIC AI Collaborative to use artificial intelligence for sharing expertise with future system thinkers working toward more responsive and inclusive governance.

Grievance redress mechanisms (GRMs) offer an opportunity for AI-powered citizen engagement. The World Bank Group mandates effective GRMs in all projects with significant environmental or social impacts. India's Centralized Public Grievance Redress and Monitoring System (CPGRAMS) is one of the largest such initiatives globally, redressing over 11.2 million grievances between 2019 and 2024.  

Yet most systems—including CPGRAMS—prioritize administrative processes over user-friendliness. They use complex forms, rigid categories, and text-heavy sites that require digital skills, making access difficult for many. Recognizing this constraint, CPGRAMS has recently issued a tender to rebuild its platform with AI features.

How AI Can Transform GRMs

• AI, especially Natural Language Processing (NLP), can now understand the way people actually speak, including informal multilingual complaints like "paani nahi aa raha" (water not coming), and route them to the correct department.
• Voice AI enables users with limited literacy to submit complaints through feature phones or IVR helplines, without navigating websites.
• When linked with other public datasets, AI can detect systemic issues, anticipate complaint surges, and suggest policy interventions.

But to unlock this potential, GRMs must be redesigned based on citizens' needs rather than administrative rules.

Prototyping AI & GRMs in New Delhi

To support CPGRAMS in their effort to rebuild their system, this past June, New Delhi hosted a five-day design sprint organized by Agami (a nonprofit working to transform systems of law and justice) in collaboration with the World Bank and CPGRAMS. The event brought together over 60 changemakers, including AI developers, civil society leaders, public officials, and legal technologists.

Leading CIVIC's participation in this design sprint, I witnessed firsthand how diverse perspectives can unlock breakthrough innovations. For example, a team of grassroots leaders working on urban issues observed that street vendors avoid using CPGRAMS, preferring the Jeevika app or local NGOs. This highlighted the need for GRMs tailored to users, not just institutions. By the end of the sprint, four open-source prototypes were developed for testing and future integration into India’s GRM ecosystem.

Key Insights from the Design Sprint

Breakthroughs emerged when grassroots knowledge, government realities, and AI came together, highlighting both gaps and opportunities in today’s grievance systems.

✔ Grassroots Wisdom

CSOs emphasized that trust is central. When citizens—especially migrant workers or daily wage earners—file grievances and never hear back, they don’t try again. For many, CPGRAMS seems inaccessible. CSOs pointed out that the systems must be trustworthy, user-friendly, and responsive to marginalized groups.

✔ Government Realities

Key barriers include fragmented, non-integrated systems, overburdened grievance officers, and limited data analysis capacity. Solutions need to be simple to implement, analytically robust, interoperable, and fit public sector workflows.

✔ Technology Possibilities

Technologists demonstrated that AI goes beyond a product feature—it enables rapid transformative results with fewer resources. By training models on real CPGRAMS grievance data, they improved issue routing to better match citizen language.

✔ The Role of Mobilization

GRMs won’t work if people don’t know or trust them. CSOSs help by connecting communities with these systems, informing and encouraging citizens to use formal grievance platforms.

Design Principles & Prototype Features

Five principles guided development of CivicBridge by design sprint participants and led to three tightly‑linked interfaces:

These CIVIC bridge principles suit both national and World Bank project GRMs, keeping marginal costs low and adoption attractive.

Raising the Bar

1. The Meet Citizens Where They Are Prototype enables users to submit complaints in an easy process similar to ordering food. The AI chatbot can interpret Indian languages, dialects, and context—e.g., routes “paani nahi aa raha” to the water department—without requiring users to pick from more than 18,000 subcategories. 

2. Leverage Civil Society - Citizens can request help from verified CSOs with a tap or voice command—especially important in emergencies, such as medical crisis or suicidal distress due to denied pensions.

3. Increase Transparency - An ecommerce–style case tracker shows updates on each complaints—unlike the current opaque systems where users are uninformed.

What's Next: Scaling AI-Driven GRMs

The design sprint proved that collaboration among citizens, civil servants, and technologists can make grievance redress processes more efficient and data-driven. The next step is to integrate these practices into CPGRAMS, developing playbooks, and building awareness among teams working on World Bank-funded projects.

The CIVIC AI Collaborative is now building a platform to support governments interested in adopting these methods, turning the New Delhi design sprint into a repeatable process. Whether you’re a policymaker, developer, or civic innovator, the call is open: join us in prototyping the future of citizen-centered governance solutions.