Digital Mapping for Transparency

Public works projects in India are often subject to corruption and leakage, although a strong anti-corruption movement has generated political will to tackle “last-mile” corruption (i.e. decentralized corruption in entitlement schemes). Last-mile corruption in public works projects can be labor-facing, meaning that wage payments to workers are captured by intermediaries, or material-facing, in which public assets like roads are not built, but costs for materials or construction are claimed.
To enable effective public infrastructure audits, this project has produced a new data set, combining high-resolution satellite maps with location-tagged project data. It uses existing public maps to discover built infrastructure, turning the map into a starting point for material audits. The main goal of the project would be to make public map data actionable by partners on the ground, by equipping them with data that combine official project documents with satellite map data. We want to use the map data to classify slums that show concretely different types and with ranks on what type of public services each of them have access to.