Swati Ramanathan

Swati Ramanathan is an architect and urban planner who co-founded Janaagraha in Bengaluru in 2001 with Ramesh Ramanathan, and later founded Jana Urban Space. Trained with a bachelor's degree in India and a master's from the Pratt Institute in New York, she has spent two decades arguing that the quality of life in Indian cities depends less on individual projects than on the laws, institutions and planning processes underneath them.

Janaagraha started as a movement to get ordinary residents into the business of public governance and grew into an institution working on both sides of the relationship: with citizens in city neighbourhoods, and with governments on what it calls City-Systems. Its citizen-facing platforms include I Change My City, a neighbourhood civic reporting network, and I Paid A Bribe, which collects public reports of bribes actually paid in order to map where and how corruption occurs in government services and argue for procedural reform. It also runs the Annual Survey of India's City-Systems, which benchmarks Indian cities against each other and against London, New York and Johannesburg on the underlying governance factors, and My City My Budget, a participatory budgeting drive that began as a pilot in a few Bengaluru wards in 2015-16 and became annual city-wide exercises in Bengaluru, Mangaluru and Visakhapatnam.

Ramanathan's own work has concentrated on urban design and planning. She has worked with national and state governments on integrated master planning, heritage conservation and guaranteed land title, and her advocacy for progressive master planning, set out in the Smart City Spatial Planning and Development Guidelines, fed into central schemes for city planning and prompted several states to revise their plan documents. Her best-known design contribution is Tender S.U.R.E., a set of specifications for urban road execution that redesigns city streets around all users and sets clear procurement standards, now in use in Indian cities. She has been named a Young Asian Leader by the Asia Society, received the Democracy and Civic Innovator Award from the National Democratic Institute in Washington, and was named, with Ramesh Ramanathan, Forbes India's Social Entrepreneur of the Year in 2013.[2][3]