Ramesh Ramanathan

Ramesh Ramanathan is an Indian social entrepreneur who works on urban governance. He founded Janaagraha with his wife Swati Ramanathan in December 2001, after a career in capital markets at Citibank in New York and London. He holds a master's degree in physics from BITS Pilani and an MBA from Yale, and was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum in 2007.

The founding impulse came from the gap between what the Ramanathans experienced as residents of Indian cities and of cities abroad. Janaagraha began as a campaign to give citizens a say in how their city spent money: the Ward Works campaign of 2001 put ward-level budget decisions to residents in Bengaluru, prioritising a Rs 120 crore works list down to Rs 10 crore, and evolved into a three-year ward planning exercise. Bala Janaagraha, a civic education programme begun in 2002, has since reached more than 400,000 school students in dozens of cities. PROOF, run with the Bengaluru city corporation, published the city's quarterly accounts for public scrutiny and led the organisation to draft a public disclosure law that it persuaded the central government to attach to the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission.

By 2005 the organisation had concluded that citizen participation alone would not change urban outcomes and began working on the machinery of city government itself. That produced the City-Systems framework, which treats the laws, finances, institutions and processes underpinning a city as the object of reform, and the Annual Survey of India's City-Systems, an independent benchmarking of Indian cities against that framework and against London, New York and Johannesburg. Related initiatives include IPaidABribe, which collects public reports of bribes paid for government services in order to identify where procedures need tightening, IChangeMyCity for neighbourhood civic complaints, and My City My Budget, a participatory budgeting drive piloted in Bengaluru wards in 2015-16 and later run with the municipal corporations of Bengaluru, Mangaluru and Visakhapatnam.

Ramanathan also co-founded the Jana Group, which took the same concern with underserved urban households into financial services. He and Swati Ramanathan were named Social Entrepreneurs of the Year by Forbes India in 2013.[2][3][4]