The world is being swept away by certain forces in technology that
are bringing people closer than ever before—and India is no exception. Together
with telecom, certain emerging
technologies are set to create a huge impact on how people connect with
each other, how enterprises produce goods and serve customers, and most
significantly, how governments engage with citizens for various purposes.
The industry has even coined a term for the new technologies
coming together to shape how businesses and governments work: the 3rd Platform,
which is driven by social media, mobile, (Big Data) analytics and cloud
computing (together called SMAC). The 3rd Platform can indeed play a major role
in delivering effective citizen services in tune with the ambitious agenda for e-governance
under the Digital India initiative. With a planned outlay of R1 lakh crore and
the goal of providing high-speed Internet access to about 2.5 lakh of the total
6.4 lakh villages in the country by 2019, Digital India envisions multiple
government services to be made available on the Internet as well as through
mobiles.
Under Digital India,
various government ministries and departments are expected to come up with
their own ICT projects for health services, education, judicial services and
other areas that touch citizens on a day-to-day basis. It has been reported
that, wherever feasible, the government will prefer to adopt public private
partnerships (PPP) to speed up the rollout of programmes and services.
One way to enable such
partnerships quickly and effectively is to build those public-private bridges
through cloud computing, especially hybrid clouds. A hybrid cloud incorporates
public clouds for access to a variety of applications and services, and private
clouds for reliable performance and security for critical applications and
sensitive data. The benefit of the hybrid cloud model is that the government
can roll out applications more quickly and cost-effectively while at the same
time, keep sensitive citizen and other confidential data secure and hosted on
servers kept within its own data centres or premises.
Another 3rd Platform
technology, social media, can help the government respond to the needs,
complaints and suggestions of citizens on its schemes and programmes. Like
mobile, social media is fast reaching a critical mass (around 100 million
Indians are said to be on Facebook, for instance)—and there’s no reason why it
shouldn’t be used by the government optimally. Social platforms such as
Facebook and Twitter can be effective medium to deliver effective services
during natural calamities. An alert mechanism can be built using Twitter, for
example, to alert people of the neighbouring area about a disaster that has
just struck a town or city. And within the disaster-hit city, the government
can enable outreach for assistance through various social media sites in
addition to, say, telephone helplines (which often get clogged in such times).
The idea is to provide multiple means of interaction to address citizen issues
and concerns.
On the mobile front, India
has one of the fastest adoption rates in the world, be it in terms of
smartphones or mobile apps. At
present, we have roughly over 900 million subscribers in India. The government must
tap into the opportunity of providing services such as healthcare by hosting
the applications on the cloud and making the same accessible through mobile
apps. In a country where tens of thousands of people shift base among various
cities for jobs or other reasons each month, the mobility of healthcare will be
an added advantage to those citizens, who will be able to see their health data
and access the services irrespective of which city they are in.
For India to be a truly
connected society, the various modes of communicating with and serving citizens
will need to be integrated in a cohesive manner. Such an approach will not only
increase citizen-government interaction and make life easier for citizens, it
will also avoid duplication of efforts and reduce expenditure on service
delivery. Mobile banking, for example, is already bringing down the cost of
serving customers significantly for banks.
There is a lot of potential
on the Big Data front too. As the government collects ever-larger amounts of
structured data related to various schemes and unstructured data through
citizen engagement on different platforms, analysing and using that “Big Data”
to derive insights for more effective planning and implementation will assume
even greater significance.
The real key for the
government will be to adopt a holistic approach to embracing the 3rd Platform
in order to accelerate the realisation of a truly Digital India.
