Many of you may be familiar with Citizen Matters, which we launched as a local newsmagazine 15 years ago. The reason we founded it remains just as relevant today—our commitment to civic engagement, active citizenship, and community-driven change. The vision of empowered citizens shaping sustainable, livable cities continues to drive us at Oorvani.
But over the years, our mission has expanded. We now connect people who want better cities with not just civic information, but also the tools, networks, and resources to make change happen.
We all know India’s urban challenges—millions living in cities with poor governance, environmental degradation, and failing public infrastructure. Transport, water supply, roads, education, and healthcare continue to be everyday struggles. Fixing these issues requires collective action, driven by a deep understanding of root causes and solutions.
That’s the journey of active citizenship we are enabling—making sense of the issues, believing in change, strengthening the agency to act, and fostering problem-solving. Our work spans the breadth of urban living—water, transport, public safety, air quality, governance, education, the environment, local economies, livelihoods, and more.
Over the last decade, we have focused on open knowledge platforms to catalyze better cities through civic media, open data, citizen engagement, and community events. Citizen Matters is now a rich knowledge repository of urban issues, developments, and solutions. Open City complements this by providing public data, documents, and crowdsourced information to empower citizens further.
In the last two years, we’ve expanded our work to be more interactive and responsive to the civic community. Our Civic Learning Hub builds capacity through learning modules, workshops, meet-ups, jams, and summits—fostering deeper connections among changemakers. The India Civic Summit brings together our core community—what we call the “Change Network”—civic groups and individuals working to make cities better.
With all these growing initiatives, we felt it was time for our identity to evolve as well. We’re excited to share the new Oorvani logo and our upgraded site!
The logo reflects the vision of “empowered citizens”, and a clear focus on civic change for better cities. As we step into the next phase of our journey, we look forward to continuing this work with you!