DAKSH is a civil society organisation that undertakes research and activities to promote accountability and better governance in India. It was founded in 2008 by people from diverse backgrounds, including academicians, entrepreneurs, lawyers, teachers, social and political activists, and ordinary citizens. Over the last seven years, DAKSH has been working to create inclusive, transparent, self-correcting mechanisms that encourage accountability in all branches of the government.
Our two main activities are measuring political and judicial performance. We have designed, developed, and deployed a variety of measures to assess and analyse performance in the political space, such as conducting physical surveys to gather data on people’s perceptions of their elected representatives. The most significant one was a national, physical survey of over 2,65,000 people in 2014, assessing their perceptions of their Members of Parliament (MPs).
We embarked on the Rule of Law Project in 2014 in order to evaluate judicial performance and in particular, to study the problem of pendency of cases in the Indian legal system. This project is based on quantitative research that will map the administration of justice in India.
