Policy Pulse: Driving Policy Data to On-Ground Impact

While legislative frameworks like India’s Pre-Legislative Consultation Policy (PLCP) and global OECD guidelines mandate public feedback on draft laws, existing civic engagement infrastructure has failed to keep pace with skyrocketing digital participation. Driven by increased internet penetration, public consultation volume has surged by 2000%+ since 2014. Single legislative issues now regularly generate millions of responses, which arrive scattered across fragmented formats including emails, physical letters, and disparate online portals. Consequently, government bodies face an overwhelming logistical bottleneck. Consolidating, analyzing, and extracting actionable policy insights from this massive influx of unstructured public data has become nearly impossible under manual systems. This operational strain slows down legislative timelines, compromises the quality of decision-making, and severely widens the citizen-government divide. To bridge this gap, there is a critical need for a streamlined, secure, and highly scalable Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI). Leveraging advanced AI and language technologies is essential to automate feedback synthesis, ensuring democratic participation remains accessible to all citizens—regardless of literacy or geography—while providing policymakers with manageable, data-driven insights.

Civis (www.civis.vote) is a Section 8 non-profit organisation that works with governments to make policymaking more participatory, inclusive, and evidence-based through the use of civic technology. By designing and managing end-to-end public consultations, Civis enables governments to engage meaningfully with citizens and stakeholders, simplifying complex policy documents, conducting targeted outreach, collecting diverse feedback, and transforming public inputs into actionable policy insights. Since its inception, Civis has facilitated consultations on over 1,300 draft laws and policies, gathering more than 9 lakh points of feedback from citizens across 777+ cities and towns in India. To make public consultations more efficient, scalable, and actionable, Civis has developed AI-powered tools that strengthen governance and improve policymaking. Supported by the IndiaAI Mission, its suite of solutions leverages Artificial Intelligence to analyse public feedback, identify gaps in draft policies, interpret complex policy documents, and support data-driven decision-making. By combining technology, policy expertise, and stakeholder engagement, Civis helps governments build more transparent, responsive, and citizen-centric public institutions.