Twitter Seva made ministries answer citizens' complaints in public (interview)

In a 'Been There, Built That' account told to Rest of World in May 2020, Raheel Khursheed, Twitter India's first head of news, politics and government, describes launching Twitter Seva in 2016, an e-governance platform that let Indian citizens request help from government ministries through Twitter mentions. His starting observation: public complaint hotlines took calls that went nowhere, while on Twitter ordinary people tagged powerful ministers and got almost immediate responses.

The mechanism made complaints public and assignable. Each mention became a ticket routed to the officer who could resolve it, and prominence raised the stakes — if an editor, influencer or the community had seen a complaint, 'you get shamed if you don't respond'. Khursheed recalls a train passenger whose broken air-conditioning was fixed within minutes of a tweet, with staff returning to check he was satisfied. The team also reframed the metric that mattered: from follower counts to how fast you resolve issues — 'from a vanity metric to an impact metric'.

Adoption came through one early adopter. After Mumbai and Delhi police conversations went nowhere, the Bengaluru police commissioner opened up his organisation for an experiment; the team first manually tracked mentions and assigned officers, then automated it, and at peak the Bengaluru police addressed 500 tickets a day. Public praise for responsive officers created a virtuous circle, and other ministries followed — 'if the railways can do it, then we can too'.

Publicity changed the incentive: an unanswered public mention cost reputation, a dead hotline cost nothing.

Routing each mention to a named officer turned goodwill into an auditable workflow rather than heroics.

Public praise gave government officers daily recognition their work rarely earned, so departments competed on speed.

One willing commissioner proved the workflow at scale, making every later ministry pitch a demonstration, not a promise.

Sunlight plus workflow beats escalation: publish the complaint, route it to a named owner, and reward the fix in public — adoption spreads when officers see officers praised.

By the time Khursheed left Twitter in 2018, Twitter Seva was live in at least 15 Indian ministries and had launched in Indonesia, with Brazil under discussion. He says the product fell by the wayside after his departure, attributing its modest reach to being built in a 'back or beyond' market rather than at Twitter HQ.