Digital india has a slow and steady start

It is indeed good news that DIGI-locker launched by the government has crossed 1 million users as of 24th november,2015. Visit the site to know more. Latest statistics show that the number of users is 1011787 and 1176821 documents have been uploaded.

Other initiatives of the Digital India campaign like eHospital online registration system(ORS) have also started to be increasingly used. Indian patients have traditionally been shortchanged by the government medicare system. With government hospitals overflowing with patients and a steady stream of people getting in/out to inquire or seek appointment. Now, they can book an appointment with a doctor at any of the premier government hospitals from their homes. Visit this site to know more. Latest statistics show that there are 14 number of hospitals on the portal, appointments taken today stands at 409, total online appointments at 92905, e-Hospital New patient's Appointments Taken Today at 4669, e-Hospital Followup patient's Appointments Taken Today at 3715, e-Hospital Total Appointments since 1st July 2015 at 917477. The numbers in the site need a bit of explanation to understand but since the last time i visited the site a few weeks back the number of appointments has grown by leaps and bounds. It was somewhere around 80k appointments and after three weeks i see the number has zoomed to 917k.

Biometric attendance in government departments has taken off to a great start. 612 organizations are onboard and with 170106 registered employees and 78335 present today, 4507 active devices today. Visit this site for the latest. The attendance of government employees will be slowly expanded to include all departments of the government.

National Scholarship portal at the site here is a must visit site for meritorious students from backward castes and minorities. Latest statistics show 7 departments/ministries on board using the site with 19 registered schemes and 1138 registered boards/universities and 8468953 total temporary registrations and 6828397 completed applications submitted out of which 3934310 completed applications submitted with aadhaar.

Digitize India platform is a program where government departments after scanning the documents to be digitized can take it to the final conclusion step where documents image is converted to text. The slogan here is "pixel to text" and volunteers with aadhaar can register and earn points. These points can then be redeemed for cash which gets deposited in their aadhaar linked bank account. Visit this site for the latest news. Statistics from this site say that there are 261439 Documents with 2415448 Snippets out of which 2119267 are Digitized and there are as of now 14088 contributors.

Finally the My Gov website has a cool interface and conducts several contests and actively seeks suggestions from the people in the running of the government. Here is the site. Statistics show that there are 1.58Million Registered Members of MyGov and 155.16K Submissions in 370 Tasks and 1.29Million Comments in 404 Discussion Themes. I have recently suggested in the MyGov site that the government should set targets to every department and depute resources to oversee digitization. If needed they should also take help of volunteers such as engineering college students who want to do internship. I have also suggested to the same site that the government should reveal the identity of those employees who are habitually flouting rules regarding attendance in office.

This is definitely not the end of the list. It is just to show you how a beginning has been made. There is talk of launching a dashboard depicting all the progress happening with real-time statistics from government departments. Such an open and transparent system would go a long way in creating confidence among people and people may draw comfort in the improving government services. I also happened to visit a site which does data visualization of government statistics and presents statistics in an easy to understand manner.
Just the other day i read news about blood banks being mandated to reveal statistics of daily blood availability in a portal. Human milk banks are being launched across states where infants could be given nourishment in case they do not receive it from their mothers. Small steps like these have endeared the new government with the people. Saw a dashboard of the rural electrification progress, dashboard of employees provident fund and several other organizations. Conclusion is that India has started dashing towards the finish line.


This is my earlier post on the digital India theme.... => http://aadhaar4governance.blogspot.in/2015/02/digital-india-to-rely-on-aadhaar.html 

Unified Payment Interface - An eagerly awaited service

Imagine more than a billion users of a payment service so easy to use, so secure and so simple that even kids would like to use it to pay for their daily dose of kinder joy. This would be the mega mega mega event that finally would drive the last nail in the coffin of cash here in india.

The idea or motivation for a unified payment interface arose after significant enrollment of people in the aadhaar project. Payment banks were conceived by RBI as banks which would operate to ease payments using electronic means and would only offer deposits and no lending. Eleven licenses were handed out majority of them to telecom firms and a few industrial houses with deep pockets.

Mobile money transactions have lately crossed 10k crore mark in terms of value(monthly). IMPS even though secure and relatively free of fraud had seen limited uptake. Unified Payment Interface which is built on top of IMPS would use any of the publicly known identifiers like aadhaar number or email Id or mobile number or virtual payment Id as a token in payment transactions. No one would know whether a bank account or a payment bank account or a wallet is linked with these identifiers at the back end. This makes the process of transferring money from the mobile a lot more easier.

Not only this, you could also request someone to take money from your account by sharing your token and then authorizing the transaction by entering a password in your banking app.

Now comes the most elegant part. Smart phones with apps from either your bank/payment bank/wallet would have a dashboard where you could enter anybody's identifier and amount to be transferred. The money transfer would happen immediately. What is more you could set a limit to the amount that can be transacted daily, monthly and per transaction also. Needless to mention this app will be very very popular as

a) It would be usable throughout the country for every conceivable payment, be it to purchase vegetables or bus ticket while traveling or any other small ticket transaction.

b) This interface would be really simple and easy to use.

c) This interface will be the one provided by the government and hence meant for the masses.

Finally by end of 2016 we would witness a moment so great that it would be mentioned as the dawn of an era in cashless payments in India.

How telecom companies and websites collaborate to milk customers

You might have a limited data internet connection. If you visit some site where videos play automatically it consumes nearly 20-30 MB of your data at one go. News sites serve advertisements at the cost of consumers.

Let's calculate:

My internet connection is a BSNL(cheapest) USB Dongle the latest data pack for which i have recharged is offering 5 GB for two months(60 days) with cost of 451 rupees. Hence 10 MB costs nearly 1 rupee to me. One advertisement costs nearly 2-3 rupees. Over several browsing sessions this may come to nearly 10-15 rupees per day.

Automatic page refresh of news sites is another technique these sites drive up the data traffic to their sites.

People wishing to watch news are being bombarded with unwanted videos and causing lot of unnecessary traffic. Someone needs to take up the cudgels against such fleecing by sites/telecom companies.

This they claim as a means of monetization and revenue generation.