Over the next two years, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) wants to make all citizen-facing government interfaces truly digital. Citizens will be able to track their requests on the portals end-to-end. Eventually, instead of citizens reaching out to apply for various government schemes, the services will reach the citizens, Abhishek Singh, CEO, National eGovernance Division (NeGD) told BusinessLine.

Moreover, the government is currently working towards upgrading the existing technology stacks to integrate services delivered across various government schemes.

“In the next two years, I hope that all interfaces the citizens have with the government will become digital. Citizens will become more empowered with the services that government delivers; they will be able to track their service requests with the government in an end-to-end manner. Instead of citizens applying for the services, the services will reach citizens. There will be a paradigm shift in the way services are delivered once we are able to use these solutions to integrate services,” Singh said.

For instance, the rural development department knows that somebody is a beneficiary of Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act 2005 (MGNREGA) scheme and is earning for 100 days a year, then that person can also be eligible for Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojna housing scheme, Ayushman Bharat Yojna, scholarship schemes etc. Hence, a citizen may not need to apply separately for these schemes and the government will reach out to them directly based on their eligibility and deliver those services.

“These are some of the plans we are going to work on over the next two years to make service discovery easier, to integrate services, to offer services across departments and to allow citizens to track benefits in a transparent and easy manner,” he said.

Getting Digital

Over the past five-six years, the government has introduced several technology-based solutions across segments, some of those major initiatives include Aadhar, DigiLocker, UPI, eSanjeevani Telemedicine and more recently Aarogya Setu app and the Cowin portal. Many of these services took off during pandemic. All of these platforms were built on free and open-source software.

As of September 17, Cowin portal was recording around 25 million vaccinations over 12-14 hours per day, Singh said. This translates to 500 vaccination doses per second.

“When 500 doses are recorded, the number of API hits are more than thousand plus. That requires robust architecture and scalable infrastructure. That was worked upon and built that’s why the system didn’t crash. We were worried if the system would be able to take the load, but having the right architecture allowed us to build that strength and we were able to demonstrate to the world that India has the capability to build population scale public digital platforms be it for Aarogya Setu, Aadhar, UPI, or DigiLocker,” Singh said.

Last year, government’s e-Sanjeevani Telemedicine was used only for doctors to consult other specialist doctors--- built with a capacity of managing 5,000 consultations a day. This was scaled up rapidly on MeitY-enabled cloud service to allow almost lakhs of consultations per day, including patient to doctor consultations. More than 1.25 crore consultations have happened on the platform so far. Aarogya Setu too has recorded 20 crore users, while DigiLocker grew from 3.8 crore users last year in April to more than 8 crores now. MyGov user registrations have gone up by over 100 per cent. “Now the challenge for us to solve is to create more population scale solutions, which can be deployed world over,” Singh added.

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