Govt to leverage social media to address critical issues

The Indian government is betting big on social media and planning to use it to address critical socio-economic issues. The government has also prepared a draft of a Social Media framework in this regard.

"There are issues and programmes like NREGA, Food Security Bill and e-governance projects where it is imperative for the Government to engage the public through consultations," R Chandrashekhar, Secretary, Department of Telecommunications, Ministry of Communications and IT said. "This is where the Government can leverage the power of social media," he added.

Speaking at the the World IT Forum 2012 during the Plenary Session on 'Networking — connecting people' he said there is a need for the Government to have a systematic engagement on social media.
The World IT Forum 2012 came to a close today after two days of sessions deliberating on the role of ICT in agriculture, education, health and e-governance, within the overall theme of ICT for sustainable human development.

Some of the Sessions during the day included scaling up and commercialising of ICT in agriculture models, capacity building with special attention to project management, administrative reforms and cyber security, using ICT to improve health outcomes and transforming service delivery channels, NextGen farming, open learning and distance education, mobile technologies for financial inclusion.

During the second plenary session yesterday on 'ICT for Development', J.Satyanarayana, Secretary , Department of Electronics and IT, Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, said for real gains , it is important to institutionalise ICT at the State and National levels with the mandate that each project must have a strong focus on ICT especially built into it.

At the closing ceremony of WITFOR 2012, Satyanarayana ceremonially handed over the sixth edition of WITFOR to Prof. Benjamin Baran from Paraguay. The theme for WITFOR 2013 is “ICT : Collaborative, Inclusive and Innovative Development.

World Information Technology Forum (WITFOR) was initiated by the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) to exploit the developmental opportunities offered by digital technologies and the need for developing and developed countries to collaborate to benefit from such opportunities. Started in 2003, IFIP organizes WITFOR every second year in cooperation with the government of the host country and many other stakeholders.