Enhancing the Reach of Public Services Through Mobile Governance: The Mobile Seva Initiative in India

Abstract

Mobile governance has emerged as a new paradigm for enhancing the reach of and access to public services by the citizens. While the Common Service Centres (CSCs) have helped in enhancing access to public services in rural areas, low penetration of computers and Internet in the country has hindered wider access. In July 2011, the Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY), Government of India launched a new countrywide initiative on mobile governance, named as Mobile Seva. This project aims at creating a common platform to enable all government departments and agencies in the country at central, state, and local levels to provide their electronic services through mobile phones and tablets. The project has achieved very good success within a short time. It already has 980 departments across the country on board and is offering over 295 services through mobile devices. The platform has already delivered over 775 million SMS based transactions to the citizens and businesses. It has also created a Mobile AppStore with over 290 live mobile apps for a wide range of public services. In this paper, I analyse the performance of this project in detail and examine the critical factors behind its success. I also examine the potential failure factors that, if not addressed properly, may undermine the project’s sustainability in the medium and long term. The analysis in the paper shows that the project has achieved its success due to a number of factors that include formulation of a national policy framework on mobile governance and support from the highest decision making body on National e-Governance Plan in the country, responsiveness of the implementing team, ease of onboarding and implementation for the departments, portal effectiveness, performance reliability, transparency and participatory design. However, there are a number of potential critical failure factors that may affect the performance of the project in future. These include lack of technical knowhow and qualified resources within departments, lack of adequate power and connectivity at department offices, lack of detailed understanding about departments’ systems, lack of face to face interaction and lack of adequate awareness about the project. These issues need to be addressed properly to ensure that the project does not suffer a sustainability failure in the long term. Developing an appropriate business model and ensuring institutional support for the project are also very important factor for its long-term sustainability.