SMS is official document now
24 Dec 2013
SMS, the widely-used messaging service on the mobile phones, will now be accepted by government departments as a documentary proof while utilising citizen-services for making payments, registrations and various other schemes.
The central government on Monday launched the 'Mobile Seva', the national mobile-governance initiative of the department of electronics and information technology (DeitY), which aims to provide government services to the people through mobile phones and tablets.
The platform offers about 241 applications for the public with about 100 departments relating to services covering areas such as Right to Information (RTI), health, Aadhaar, education, directory services and so on.
Launching the 'Mobile Seva' service, J Satyanarayana, secretary to the department of electronics and IT, said, "Like Railways, we have to bring in a system wherein by showing SMS or, whatever be the case, the proof on mobile is accepted as valid document.
"To increase our reach we need to bring this kind of practice in mobile and e-governance," he added.
DEITY additional secretary Rajiv Gauba said about 830 departments of the central, state and local authorities have come on board, and the department is working on the third phase to further scale up the mobile governance platform and bring more services under its ambit.
"We have to go through inter-ministerial consultations to scale this m-governance store for launch of third phase. The third phase will have many more departments and capacity to add more services application on this store. Final shape of third phase can be known only after consultation process is complete," he said.
As of now, 833 departments belonging to the central and state governments and local authorities are using `Mobile Seva' for providing SMS-based services, and over 552.5 million SMS notifications have been sent to citizens for various mobile based services.
Citizens can now directly interact with government departments through SMS. As of date, 254 public services have been made available to the citizens. DeitY has also developed a Mobile Applications Store (m-App Store) as part of Mobile Seva.
Both the Mobile Governance Portal and the m-App Store can be accessed at http://mgov.gov.in/.
The m-Appstore currently hosts over 240 live mobile applications. The live applications can be downloaded and installed free of cost on a mobile phone by any person.
India has around 900 million mobile phone subscribers.
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