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Digital Inclusion, Local Government

Indian state reaches poor via mobile phone

By Rahul Joshi | 10 May 2010

The state of Rajasthan in northern India has launched an e-governance initiative that aims to communicate essential information to the underprivileged via mobile phones. The system incorporates data migration, text-to-speech conversion in local languages, automatic dialing, and voice message transmission.

Shankar Aggarwal, Joint Secretary – DIT, Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, India, told FutureGov: “Voice calls do away with the problem of illiteracy. The e-SANCHAR project integrates mobile/telephony with ICT to generate automated voice calls to disseminate timely information to citizens.”

The public will be informed of the release and sanction of pensions, PDS information, alerts, campaigns, advisories, and other information of broad public interest, he said. In this way, the government can reach out to rural pensioners, the aged, the disabled and the less privileged. It is an example of the many partnerships involving citizens, the government, and the telecom industry, Aggarwal added.

The project is the brainchild of Tanmay Kumar, Secretary, Information Technology & Communication, Government of Rajasthan, who originally conceived of it so that the government could provide “increased transparency, accountability and responsiveness in service delivery.”

Named “e-Speech Application through Network for Automated Communication Help and Response”, it is a collaboration between RajCOMP, the state’s computer agency, and OneWorld Foundation-India. The system conveys real time information from government to citizens without an intermediary, and the state is looking to deploy it on an even larger scale; it is currently confined to the set of citizens under beneficiary programmes.

The Rajasthan government is now looking to market the initiative to other state governments in India.

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