Government of India yesterday released “Framework of Mobile Governance report”, an extension of National e-Governance Plan (NeGP), that may potentially bring about massive changes in the way Indian citizens access public services.
The Mobile Governance Framework is laid down taking into cognizance India’s huge mobile phone subscriber base of over 870 million. It aims to utilize the massive reach of mobile phones and harness the potential of mobile applications to enable easy and round-the-clock access to public services, especially in the rural areas.
Objectives of Mobile Governance Framework
- Web sites of all Government Departments and Agencies shall be made mobile-compliant, using the “One Web” approach. Which means
- It will adopt Open standards for mobile applications for ensuring the interoperability of applications across various operating systems and devices as per the Government Policy on Open Standards for e-Governance.
- Uniform / single pre-designated numbers (long and short codes) shall be used for mobile-based services to ensure convenience.
- All Government Departments and Agencies shall develop and deploy mobile applications for providing all their public services through mobile devices to the extent feasible on the mobile platform. They shall also specify the service levels for such services.
To achieve the objectives, all Government websites will be made compliant with Mobile devices, so all information available on the web will also be available on mobile devices as well. Not only that, various channels, such as voice, text (e-mail and SMS), GPRS, & others will also be incorporated to ensure that all users are able to access irrespective of mobile device they have.
The m-governance framework also puts forth creation of Mobile Services Delivery Gateway (MSDG) that defines standards on how the end user interface should look, how the content will be delivered and how users will be authenticated.
As part of MSDG, the framework proposes to create Mobile Application (m-apps) marketplace that will have applications developed to deliver public services to Indian Citizens. MSDG will also incorporate an integrated mobile payment gateway system enabling users to pay for the public services through mobile devices itself.
[Full pdf of Mobile Governance Framework]