The Indian government is working on ways to accelerate the delivery of services to citizens under the Digital Government Mission, an initiative by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY). The ministry has started working on a project that will use artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to set up a more cohesive flow for the government systems, as the next step in e-Governance, and make them more intelligent so that the services are readily accessible to the citizens.
The aim of the initiative is to have services proactively anticipate citizens’ needs before they approach the services. For example, a student that qualified for a government scholarship scheme will be automatically alerted of the opportunity, even when they have not enquired about it. The ministry is envisioning a similar service for ration distribution so that people have easier access to subsidised food. This project is currently in the final stages of discussions within the Ministry of Electronics and IT, said the officials.
In a recent interview to Economic Times, MeitY Minister, Rajeev Chandrasekhar, had said that MeitY was strategising to make a digital government in line with the Prime Minister’s vision of accelerating digitalisation of government.
“In the last seven years, we have done a considerable amount of work on Digital India, and you’ve had successes like UPI, Aadhaar etc. But in the next three years, hopefully, we will create a framework where we break down silos within the government. So, there is a digital government plan that is being architected and designed. It will become the next generation of e-governance,” Chandrasekhar had said.
Subsequent Indian governments have harboured the national e-governance mission for more than 15 years. Over the years, government services like passports, land records, certificates, income tax have been digitised as part of this initiative.
In 2020, a policy discussion paper called the National Open Digital Ecosystem (NODE) was released. It laid out the strategy to replicate successful projects such as Aadhaar, the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), the Goods and Services Tax Network (GSTN) to smoothen and improve governance and citizen delivery with the help of private companies’ know-how and technological capabilities.
“We are looking at platformization of the current projects. For instance, the health mission follows a platform approach where there is going to be one interface for all the major initiatives. Similar is the case for education, agriculture, transport, where we want to transform them into one domain,” the government official concluded.
Preliminary estimates suggest that by 2030, NODEs have the potential to unlock over US$500 billion in economic value together with tremendous societal and governance benefits.
Source: indiaai.gov.in
