Hyderabadi girl to speak at World Economic Forum on making cities livable

The World Economic Forum has invited a city-based civic entrepreneur to speak at its annual meeting to be held from January 23-26 at Davos in Switzerland.

Dipika Prasad, co-founder of Lakeer, a civic initiative, would be joining over 150 Indian leaders including Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Mukesh Ambani and Telangana IT minister KT Rama Rao at the meet and would speak on citizen-action to build livable cities as part of a “Big Ideas” session.

Her initiative, Lakeer, takes up citizen-centric issues and deploys citizen champions in neighbourhoods for the purpose, who in turn raise the issue with government representatives and also ropes in private players including start-ups to solve the problems.


“We have identified six neighbourhoods in Hyderabad where our Citizen Champions will work with the society members to identify issues like drinking water issues, drainage etc. We have created a data platform where our representatives can submit the problems and we will match it with a specific solutions. We also plan to partner the government in the coming days to sort out municipality related issues,” said Dipika.

Dipika, who works as an associate vice-president at Intellecap Innovation Labs, will start working full time on this initiative, which was started a year back, from next month.

She is the curator of the Global Shapers Community in Hyderabad, a global initiative of the World Economic Forum with 7000 members in 150 countries who are working towards making a positive change in their communities.

She also plans to raise about Rs 3 crore to build a robust data platform and enroll more citizen champions as employees.