By Srinath Srinivasan
India’s digital infrastructure has been a worldwide case study for modernisation and has amazed huge tech corporations in private sectors across the globe. One of the factors for this is the scale at which the digital services operate all through the length and breadth of the nation. Making them more unified, relevant to every single area and taking the services to the final mile is UMANG or Unified Mobile Appplication for New-Age Governance, which has been in operation for the final 3 years.
“There are so many government URLs and portals today that people get confused which is what and also which is genuine. UMANG unifies them all with authentic information, encouraging people to use those services,” says Abhishek Singh, president & CEO, National E-Governance Division (NeGD), beneath the ministry of Electronics and IT CEO, MyGov MD & CEO, Digital India Corporation.
The demand for these services went up for the duration of the Covid-induced lockdown drastically. In March 2020, there had been 643 services and as of today, the quantity has gone upto 2084 services, covering a variety of services across many states. To hold up with the demand, the technical group at UMANG has even updated the app for the duration of the lockdown period. As a outcome, it can manage higher transaction loads and provide greater user knowledge to customers in their personal languages.
“For people who do not have access to a smartphone, we developed an assisted mode of accessing the services. We partnered with local service centres/CSCs, which are like front-end outlets in the rural areas where people can go and avail their services,” says Singh. Around 3,75,000 of them have been set up so far across the nation. There is a programme management group, a group of seven experts who analyse distinct states, their digital platforms and assess which services can be brought on board and how it can be integrate onto UMANG. “We have around 25 members in the back-end development team. There are developers who write codes and API’s. And then we have the front-end team, a small team of nine to 10 people who does the UI/UX part,” adds Singh. This technical group is supported by a group of 25-30 men and women who handle the enable desk.
According to Singh, this is a time of fast development for the platform, which indicates that there is going to be continuous on-boarding of services from distinct states. At this time the platform can not be opened for third celebration developers who can bring their suggestions to life in the service of men and women. “Once this entire ecosystem stabilises, we can think of opening it up for developers who can think of building more value added services, because that’s where the real opportunity will be. And that’s where we’ll be able to harness the capabilities and potential that exists in our tech,” he says.
UMANG is open to partnerships with tech startups as properly. One such instance is in bringing out voice primarily based services. Singh says, “We are looking at Indian tech startups to offer voice based services. For example, if you want to check your passport status you should be able to ask though UMANG about the status of the passport. “We would be doing this via tender because it will be like a contract, wherein we will give preference to startups, and that is what we are allowed to do as a government agency.”
While technologies has solved for most components so far, there are some challenges for which some level of additional innovation requires to be constructed. Currently, the platform is offered in 13 languages and Singh says that taking it additional into final mile in all 22 official languages in the subsequent six to nine months will be the quick challenge. Next comes the the challenge of scale. So far, the platform has had 122 crore transactions and practically 40,000 new customers are joining the platform on an typical, each and every day. Singh expects this development to raise by 35% in the subsequent a single year across distinct languages and regions.