Smruthi Swaminathan is on top of the world having returned from the annual Global Shapers Curator Summit at the World Economic Forum in Geneva, Switzerland.
The Chennai resident was among a select few from India to take part in the conference (September 2 to 4), which hosted young leaders and activists under 30 from more than 150 countries.
Smruthi got invited to be the guest speaker at the workshop on ‘Strengthening Civic Engagement in Local Communities’.
In 2021, before the Tamil Nadu Assembly Election, the Chennai Hub of the Global Shapers developed a “bilingual manifesto consolidator website” to enable voters to make informed choices.
“If party ‘A’ had a 100-page manifesto, we tried to bucket it under agriculture, education, health et cetera thus making it easy for a voter to understand the various aspects of the manifesto. The larger goal of this project was to drive democracy through data,” says Smruthi, a data scientist.
Smruthi says being a first-time voter she was naturally drawn to this idea. “I tried to help myself and in the process we helped many others. Through Google analytics, we were able to measure that the manifesto reached millions of citizens,” says the 24-year-old who is the Curator for Chennai Hub 2022-23.
An alumni of DAV School, Gopalapuram, Smruthi has been a curious citizen since her school days. She was student reporter of YOCee for three years and considers interviewing cricketer Mike Hussey one of her best assignments. Post her engineering degree, she interned with Teach for India.
“I taught at a government school in MGR Nagar, which was another huge learning experience,” says Smruthi, a SPICMACAY member and Young Leaders for Active Citizenship Fellow.
