M-governance for Better Administration

The state of Kerala has been a forerunner in the utilization of the ICT technologies. There are a number of initiatives that have been taken by the state government to utilize the ubiquitous medium of communication mobile phones for its m-governance initiatives.

So while a fisherman in Kerala gets comfortable finding the price of his catch, and a farmer gets busy getting alerts for his paddy crops, the credit goes to the Kerala government for democratizing information through VAS and empowering the 'aam-aadmi'

The state has truly embarked on a new journey by the exemplary way. It has been leveraging the VAS applications to make them available for the governance purposes and has been setting benchmarks for the other states to follow. VAS (primarily SMS) forms the basis of the m-governance services via which the government is disseminating critical and often tedious information to citizens.

The m-governance projects have been deployed to give quick, relevant information to the citizens and also to bring more accountability and transparency to the various departments. Departments from tourism, information and PR, health, district collectorate, education, agriculture have been utilizing the mobile and wireless technologies. The 3 channels of mobile communication (voice, signaling, and data) and a wide range of technologies (voice applications, applications using signaling channel, and data service based applications) are being used for this purpose.

There are also some initiatives that have gained international reputation like Dr SMS Project which was initiated by KSITM on May 29, 2008. The sole idea of the project is to enable people to use their mobile phones to receive information on health resources and to provide the user with a comprehensive list of medical facilities available in that locality, like hospitals having expertise in various medical specialties. This project reportedly proved very beneficial to the citizens and resulted in reducing queues in the hospitals and also improving health facilities across the state.

Other pioneering projects based on the VAS applications are used by the tourism department to disseminate the related information. These are used by the motor vehicle department in which PCR vehicles in Cochin city were enabled with camera mobile phones which are being used to record accident and atrocious activity scenes from a location and transfer it in real-time over GPRS to the central police rooms. They have helped the state machinery to reduce the crime scene in the state.

A study relating to fishermen in coastal Kerala-access of timely information by the fishermen about the market prices led to an overall increase in the efficiency of the markets. It also increased the welfare of the fishermen as well as the buyers of fish.

Ecstatic over the success, the government is planning more projects that are in the pilot phase. The state is providing mobile based services to all the citizens, across service providers on a sustainable basis and an aggregation system is planned for the state government. This would enable the government to charge for services provided on the mobile phones across all the telecom service providers.

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To give a sneak into the reasons as to how the initiatives made by the government, found an easy base and acceptability with the citizens are that the impressive teledensity levels in the state of Kerala is the main factor, that led to an early adoption and success of the m-governance projects in the state. Statistics have it that as many as 3,769,449 wireless subscribers and 53,134 wireline subscribers are there in the state with a total population of 33,387,677 (Census of India, 2011). Further, it has been estimated that Kerala will breach 100% teledensity by end of 2011.

Now, as 3G related VAS applications are rolling out more innovativeness on the part of the state machinery of Kerala and other states can be easily expected. Till now, most of the information was distributed through SMS. The focus till now was to build a centralized platform into which the services/solutions for each and every department can be integrated mainly via SMS. It is worth mentioning that if SMS was the key VAS service for 2G services, then video is supposed to be the key application for 3G.

In the coming years, more m-governance for better administration can be expected as citizens wait to see large variety of customized applications tapping into m-commerce, m-education, m-democracy, m-tourism, etc, related services.

Archana Singh
archanasi@cybermedia.co.in