Keeling Curve

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Project Summary / Description:

The purpose of our project 'CarbonWatch' is to bring a paradigm shift in India's data governance, starting with the federal territory of Chandigarh, by bringing actionable environmental information to people's living rooms, office and discussion spaces. 

Even after the entire hullabaloo over environmental degradation, very little has changed. Data collection seems to be the end goal of almost all programs while extracting discernible information out of it, has been rarely looked into. This leads to an information vacuum. 

We intend to lead individual citizen action and bring actionable information access to the people.

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If someone has followed the trajectory of India's environmental initiatives and citizen partnership programs over the recent years, they'll know that access to authentic emissions data, actionable data analysis and knowledge dissemination on the ripple effects of GHGs are almost non-existent in India's public discourse. 

What one might get to see are - academic research papers, convoluted government readouts and anachronistic data analyses that lend no credible vision or purpose to the much-touted initiatives of the government and public sector agencies in the fight against climate change. 

This background was necessary to be given as this gives the proper context of how empowering this project is: - 

a) Gives access to all citizens wherein rich and poor benefit alike, because of its availability on a web portal that is even accessible via smartphones. 

b) Gives graphical representations of much of the data thereby empowering those that they may not have the benefit of a science degree or basic college education, this disadvantaged group being quite high in number considering that our education rates are only pegged at about 70%. 

c) Empowers the citizens to open up dialogues and discussions with their local governments. In a country like India, that has historically fared badly when it comes to public data sharing, this is a big win for the data-disadvantaged population. 

d) The conjunctive approach of citizen mobile app and public data dashboards, gives a participatory feeling to the residents, making them invested in this idea of citizen driven change. This point holds even more weight for hill populations and forest populations that have had a genuine grouse of being denied information that pertains to their ecosystem and local environment.

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