Digital Empowerment of Citizens

Digital connectivity is a great leveler. Cutting across demographic and socio-economic segments, Indians are increasingly connecting and communicating with each other through mobile phones and computers riding on digital networks. The Digital India programme itself promises to transform India into a digitally empowered society by focusing on digital literacy, digital resources, and collaborative digital platforms. This also places emphasis on universal digital literacy and availability of digital resources/services in Indian languages. 

Universal Digital Literacy

Digital literacy assumes paramount importance at an individual level for truly and fully leveraging the potential the Digital India programme. It provides the citizens the ability to fully exploit the digital technologies to empower themselves. It helps them seek better livelihood opportunities and become economically secure.

The focus is on making at least one person e-literate in every household. Core ICT infrastructure set up by the central and state governments, such as CSCs, can play a critical role in taking digital literacy to the remotest locations of the country. To ensure that all panchayats in the country have high-speed connectivity, the Department of Telecom (DoT) has established Bharat Broadband Network Ltd. (BBNL) to roll out the National Optical Fiber Network (NOFN). BBNL will lay out the optic fiber cable terminating in each of the 2,50,000 gram panchayats in the country, providing 100 Mbps link to be used as information highway by all the stakeholders to ensure that digital inclusion reaches all villages across the country. This will ensure digitization and connectivity of the local institutions, such as panchayat office, schools, health centres, libraries, etc. The industry has also come forward to support the e-literacy goal through the National Digital Literacy Mission.

National Institute of Electronics and Information Technology (NIELIT), an autonomous society under DeitY, has identified more than 5000 facilitation centres across the country for training on courses which will equip a person to undertake e-Governance transactions through computers and other basic activities, like e-mail, browsing the internet, etc. NIELIT has also signed MoUs with industry partners towards jointly conducting courses and online examinations on digital literacy.

Universally accessible digital resources

Digital resources can be termed as universally accessible when they are easily available everywhere and by everyone besides being user friendly. Open resources have certain advantages over the commercially available digital resources. First and formost among the advantages is that they are widely available and are inexpensive. They can be used widely and amenable for customization. Digital resources created or implemented along these lines can be accessed by everyone compared to resources developed from proprietary systems where licensing restriction would come into play. Respective departments and agencies should ensure that the digital resources thus developed are of high quality standards so that they are easyly accessible and customizable.

The National Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy (NDSAP) requires government organizations to proactively release their datasets in an open format. Implementation of NDSAP in India is being done by NIC, an agency of DeitY, through the Open Government Platform for India (http://data.gov.in) which provides a single point access to all the open-format datasets published by different government departments. DeitY is also formulating a policy on open APIs to make all the data and information provided by government organizations open and machine readable, which can then be consumed by other e-governance applications/ systems and the public. DeitY is responsible for setting up the API standards and designing a gateway for seamless sharing of information amongst the various government agencies.

Digital resources must be validated for different operating systems, diverse devices such as mobile phones, tablets, phablets, desktop computers and laptop computers etc. and varied browsers. These devices, while all able to access sites where digital resources are available, may be based on varying support standards and also may or may not support differentiated styles of content presentation and layout. In such cases, the content may not be rendered correctly on all devices. therefore, it is necessary that all the content is verified and validated for browser compatibility. Conformance to DeitY-notified standards for government data and application of the necessary style sheets and other server side solutions can help owner departments and agencies achieve this aspect of universal accessibility of their digital resources.

Under the Digital India programme, the government is also committed to providing access to digital resources for citizens with special needs. To illustrate some of the special needs would be  those with visual or hearing impairments (which may be partial or complete), learning or cognitive disabilities, physical disabilities which hinder operation of ubiquitous access devices such as phones, tablets and computers.

Universally Accesible Digital Resources:

Current Scenario:

Government documents are not easily accessible

Changed Scenario:

• Citizen related documents would be available electronically
• Government departments may access the documents issued by other government agencies
• Documents issued to the citizen would be available to them anywhere and anytime in a standard form which can be shared with an authorized agency.
• The documents will be available in local languages
• Documents can be accessed by the citizen through web portals and mobile apps.

All documents/certificates to be available on cloud

Today, citizens are asked by different department to provide government documents or certificates, which are already available with some department/institution of the government, in physical form. This does not provide the one face of the Government and Governance is seen in bad light costing the State precious goodwill. Portability of all electronic documents should be ensured. As an example, educational institutions should ensure that all their degrees and certificates are digitized and kept in online repositories with appropriate access protocols. The citizen, while filling some application form, should not be asked to submit the certified copies of his/her educational certificates but should provide details of these certificates available in an online repository which can be seen by the agency concerned using the pointer provided by the citizen. All these repositories of all government issued documents/certificates should be hosted on a cloud platform to provide a single source of authentication for these documents/certificates. The data may include categories such as digitally signed educational certificates, land records, driving licenses, permits, etc. Requesting departments or users may be provided authenticated access to the digital repository available over the cloud.

Availability of digital resources/ services in Indian languages

India has a remarkable diversity in terms of languages written and spoken in different parts of the country. There are 22 official languages and 12 scripts. Knowledge of English is limited to a very small section of the population in the country. The rest often cannot access or comprehend digital resources which are available mainly in English.

DeitY has initiated the Technology Development for Indian Languages (TDIL) programme for developing information processing tools and techniques to facilitate human-machine interaction without language barriers, creating and accessing multilingual knowledge resources, and integrating them to develop innovative user products and services. The programme also promotes language technology standardization through active participation in international and national standardization bodies such as ISO, UNICODE, World-wide-Web consortium (W3C) and Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) to ensure adequate representation of Indian languages in existing and future language technology standards.

DeitY has also initiated the Localization Projects Management Framework (LPMF) to help localize applications under the MMPs and other government applications. DeitY is also formulating a new mission mode project named as e-Bhasha to help develop and disseminate digital content in local languages to India's largely non-English speaking population. The differntly abled friendly content and systems are being developed as per accessibility standards.

Collaborative digital platforms for participative governance

Traditionally, electronic media was used for dissemination of information and provision of services to the users. Through these platforms, Government could establish communication with the citizens though it was mostly one-way which is called broadcasting. The new age digital platforms can now facilitate government departments to have effective two-way communication and interaction with citizens. with the new technology, it is now possible to have the citizen participate in a dialogue and voice his/her concerns. Platforms that are more collaborative facilitate greater participation from the users. Instead of reaching out to citizens every now and then, government can be in touch with them always through digital platforms which would facilitate participative governance.

The platform would provide a mechanism to discuss various issues to arrive at innovative solutions, make suggestions to the government, provide feedback on governance, rate the government actions/policies/initiatives, and actively participate with the government to achieve the desired outcomes.

DeitY has recently launched a nationwide digital platform named as “myGov” (www.mygov.in) to facilitate collaborative and participative governance. DeitY also maintains a social media page highlighting e-governance services being provided through NeGP at https://www.facebook.com/NationaleGovernancePlan which has lakhs of fans and followers.