In an effort to reach of the general public and to provide them with easy access to various Government services, the India Government Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY) has launched the Mobile Seva – an national mobile-governance initiative. In addition Indian citizens can also now directly interact with Government Departments through SMS.
“Like Railways, we have to bring in a system wherein by showing (transaction) SMS or, whatever be the case (like e-mail), the proof on mobile is accepted as valid document. To increase our reach we need to bring this kind of practice in mobile and e-governance.” said J Satyanarayana, Secretary, Department of electronics and IT.
Mobile Seva aims to provide easy access to various government services to the people through mobile phones and tablets. It has been developed as the core infrastructure for enabling the availability of public services through mobile devices. Mobile Seva enables the integration of the mobile platform with the common e-Governance infrastructure consisting of State Data Centers (SDCs), State Wide Area Networks (SWANs), State and National Service Delivery Gateways (SSDGs/NSDG).
The service enables a government department to integrate both web and mobile based services seamlessly and enhances the access to electronic services tremendously leveraging the very high penetration of mobile phones, especially in rural areas. As we know India has around 900 million mobile phone subscribers and this platform will be a perfect reach to them. Availability of government-wide shared infrastructure and services enables rapid development and reduced costs for the departments in rolling out mobile based services.
After the initial test phase, the Mobile Seva service now got around 833 Central and State Govt departments who are using the service to provide around 254 public SMS-based services. Using this service over 55.25 Crore SMS notifications have been sent to citizens for various mobile based services.
In addition to all this a mobile applications store (m-App Store) has also been developed by DeitY as part of Mobile Seva that currently hosts over 240 live mobile applications. The mobile apps can be downloaded and installed free of cost on a Android and Java based mobile phones.
Source – Mobile Seva