23 August,2026 11:30 AM IST | Mumbai | Junisha Dama
‘Legal Atlas’ and ‘Aapka Mohalla’ help citizens navigate civic issues. Representational pic/istock
Politics can often feel loud, overwhelming, and distant. And digesting sweeping national debates can easily exhaust anyone. Recognising this, two independent digital initiatives are bridging the gap. By transforming dense government data and complex legislation into accessible tools, these platforms are helping ordinary people stay informed.
Realising that staying updated on politics and policies demands immense privilege and time, 25-year-old applied AI engineer Vaishnavi Sonawane decided to flip the script. Vaishnavi Sonawane built Aapka Mohalla, a website and soon-to-launch mobile app to make local governance bite-sized, accessible, and tangible.
Instead of asking citizens to stress over massive policy documents, Sonawane wanted to create a bottom-up approach that fits into daily routines. "Maybe somebody is just walking around, going to their work, school, or on an evening walk, they can just see the public facilities near them and maybe just take a picture and report on issues. That is very doable. That is very tangible and not at all stressful," Sonawane explains.
Aapka Mohalla's interface
But this is just one of the many features she's fit into Aapka Mohalla. What the web/app does is essentially present itself as a one-stop spot to know more about your local corporator, the proposed or ongoing projects in your ward, the facilities provided, money spent, and more.
To build this all in one place, navigating official data proved to be a massive hurdle for Sonawane. Sifting through the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation portal meant clicking through 500 hyperlinks. Pointing out structural roadblocks, Sonawane says, "Everything is technically public, but it's not really accessible in any shape or form. So, unless somebody is really resilient enough to click through 500 hyperlinks, it's very hard to find some of this information."
Vaishnavi Sonawane and Aabha Muralidharan
To unearth everything, she spent hours manually processing 6200-page corporator affidavits, read through vague development vision plans, and found anomalies. "There are corporators in their 50s, but they have graduated class 12 only a year before the election. It's oddâ¦"
Sonawane has also built the website and app entirely out of her own pocket with software and server costs draining her day-job salary. But she refuses to seek funding from any sources that could compromise data transparency.
Her vision extends beyond mere app downloads. By introducing weekly ward walks, open dialogues, and hyperlocal heat maps of actual citizen demands, she wants local politics to feel less like a source of anxiety and more like a vibrant, communal neighborhood activity where real tangible change happens. Sonawane, who has worked on this project since November 2025, has now found a few volunteers willing to help build and maintain the web/app. This is of course thanks to the videos she has been posting on her Instagram account to promote and make people aware of her project.
Soon, she hopes to seek help from local journalists and other volunteers to expand the project to more cities.
To access: aapkamohalla.com
Another initiative is decoding the fine print of national legislation. Called the Legal Atlas, it is built by the hybrid research and journalism organisation The Polis Project.
Led by lead researcher Aabha Muralidharan alongside a dedicated team including founder Suchitra Vijayan, researcher Raaz, and data consultant and developer Andrew Pavamani, the platform maps where state power is shifting.
The interface of the website Legal Atlas
Understanding new laws is notoriously difficult. As Muralidharan explains, official documents are intentionally banal and boring. "For a layman, as a citizen, these documents can come off as very boring. In the sense they may seem very banal. You may not understand what the law is actually doing," she says.
The Legal Atlas cuts through this confusion by analysing bills through tracking legal insertions, omissions, and substitutions against parliamentary debates and ground realities.
Instead of treating laws as isolated legal texts, the platform maps them through a rigorous methodology. Visitors to the website can explore structured themes and curated trends that expose how state power shifts across sectors like criminal law, environmental regulations, and civil liberties.
Users can navigate the platform by examining these core thematic breakdowns and reading clear descriptions, allowing common citizens to connect the dots between seemingly unrelated laws and understand their direct impact on daily life.
"The intention has always been to place this information in the hands of ordinary citizens," Muralidharan says,"If there are people, for example, if today there are trans community members who are being excluded and, in one sense, who are being made stateless, if they are able to make connections between multiple laws and then understand why the food is not arriving on their table, if that is something that the Legal Atlas can do, then I think our job is mostly done."
To access: thepolisproject.com/research/legal-atlas
