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The digital transformation sweeping through the nation post-pandemic is having an impact on the Economic Survey and Union Budget papers, too. This year, all documents will be available on a mobile app.
The Economic Survey, released on Friday, was paperless this year, and the Budget documents to be tabled on Monday will also be available on the ‘Union Budget Mobile App’ that was recently launched by the Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman.
No easy journey
While it may be a lot easier to hunt for the announcements you want to find via these apps – both in English and Hindi – it has certainly not been an easy journey for the government, as for such a massive documentation, it takes a lot of bandwidth to upload.
But it has been worth the while. As of Saturday evening, the Economic Survey App had got over a 1,000 downloads, while the Budget App had also crossed 10,000 downloads on Google Play Store. Both the apps are also available in iOS, too.
The apps were developed in-house by the National Informatics Centre (NIC) and National eGovernance Division of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) over the last few months.
“The work started in September to make the Union Budget Mobile app and we have run through a lot of dummies for user interface including the application programming interface (APIs). Two teams worked in tandem to develop the app and by December we were ready for the launch,” Nagesh Shastri, Deputy Director General, NIC told BusinessLine.
The most important part of these documents was to make them secure and safe because of their paramount importance to the government.
“The Budget app will start working only after the Finance Minister’s speech in the Parliament on Monday. The documents will be bilingual (English and Hindi) and easy to access for everyone,” said Shastri.
“The App has a user-friendly interface with embedded features of downloading, printing, search, zoom in and out, bidirectional scrolling, table of contents and external links, etc,” the Finance Ministry had said during the launch of the Budget app.
For example, if one wants to see how much expenditure has been incurred by the Civil Aviation Ministry, one has to just type ‘Civil Aviation Expenditure’ and all details will appear in the app.
The mobile App facilitates complete access to 14 Union Budget documents, including the Annual Financial Statement (commonly known as Budget), Demand for Grants (DG) and Finance Bill as prescribed by the Constitution.
The App can also be downloaded from the Union Budget Web Portal.
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