A measure of the progress of MyGov, the government-to-people interface program, is discernible from the somewhat minuscule number in 35.3 lakh registered users currently and a Twitter following of 4.25 lakh people. It is a reflection of the enormous distrust that the government must overcome if it is truly to interact with the people and their problems. So much of government is so enormously citizen-unfriendly that people may find it inhibiting to just think of connecting. The process has, however, been simplified in the age of instant connectivity through the Internet and through the mobile on the even simpler app-based platform that common people can access easily enough. There are, however, huge issues like connectivity which remain to be tackled.
The Townhall event of Saturday, in which Prime Minister Narendra Modi took a leaf out of the likes of master communicators like US President Barack Obama and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, was threatening to descend into a typically Indian-style mela of handing out of certificates and honours and bureaucratic back-patting more than an interaction with the public, until Mr Modi took over in his presiding role, but mostly as a speaker for the government and only to those who can understand Hindi.
The redeeming feature was the number of young people who became part of MyGov to interact with the government in setting up the PMO mobile app and helping streamline the programs that would make meaningful connectivity possible. To make the program a tool to gauge accountability, as the finance minister promised during the day’s events, is the challenge. Without that, it is as much use as a citizen with a grievance handing in a petition to various politicians, administrators and government agencies. If the apps and programs help eliminate the middlemen and, more importantly, take away the element of graft from governance, the two years spent in incubating the platform may not go in vain.
The cautionary part of the tale is this project is a work-in-progress, but in keeping with the leaps in technology the programs can be up and running quickly. Thus far there have been several tetrabytes of talk about the information superhighway, e-governance and how an intelligent young India is poised to make the leap. Only now, talk of accountability and the promise of putting online the status of government projects is in the open. Digital India is a concept whose time has come. With the GST to roll out soon, the challenge of digitising data becomes sharper. The government has a lot of catching up to do to translate intention into action.
