Dhawan is talking about streetanchor.com, a website which harnesses users’ creativity to help address social and civic problems. All on the Internet.

From garbage disposal and broken roads to environmental damage, there is a whole gamut of issues plaguing urban and rural areas, yet there was no particular place to voice them. “These problems were all in the subconscious but the idea just hadn’t come,” says Arnab Chatterjee.

January 2007 changed all that. Three Delhiites — Sudhir Talwar along with Dhawan and Chatterjee — decided to tackle the issue, and the idea took 10 months to be born as streetanchor.com. “If you have a problem, you just need to take a video or photo and post it online. You will be able to interact with people facing similar problems and, maybe even talk to the authorities,” website CEO Dhawan says.

Chatterjee, co-founder and now chief designer, says, “Problems get solved when people get together, when they interact with those facing similar problems.” That, he says, is the site’s motto: to connect people with similar concerns. Dhawan says, “Our dream is to foster e-governance at a very common-man’s level, so that an MCD official can log into the site and see all the problems.”

He says the aim is “to reach a stage where they (officials) cannot feign ignorance”.

The site also hosts several NGOs and lawyers who, when needed, take the issue further. “If I don’t get water and you don’t get water even after we have paid, how does it make a difference if you live in a city and I live in a village?” asks Bidhy Mohapatra, coordinator of Association for Democratic Reforms, an NGO that works on electoral problems and is present on the site. “Yet, this needs a basic solution, a community level resolution; and this is where streetanchor can help.”

Mohapatra says his organisation collates information from affidavits filed by candidates before each election to bring out information on their credibility, performance in office, their assets and criminal antecedents so that citizens are aware of these facts when they go to vote. “This year, we plan to make this information available on the site,” he says.

Anish Dayal, a Supreme Court advocate listed on the site, says, “When a situation requires to be taken up in a legal framework, or if a community wants to know about the legal options they have, they will be provided with a list of lawyers who are interested in working in that public interest.”

Chatterjee says creativity has been made democratic, thanks to technology of the mobile phone camera. “All the pictures that have come out of Myanmar are from smuggled phones, or are MMS messages,” he says. “It’s a power tool for things around you. Dhawan says the site is primarily for the 18-35-year-olds — “the segment that’s driving the Internet growth and still believes that it can make a difference.”