Govt. expands Mobile Seva availability for citizens

NEW DELHI, INDIA: Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY) has taken a nationwide mobile-governance initiative, ‘Mobile Seva' -to improve the availability of public services on mobile devices.

Mobile Seva provides an integrated platform for delivery of government services to citizen over mobile devices using SMS, USSD, IVRS, CBS, LBS, or mobile applications installed on the mobile phones. It helps a government department to integrate both web and mobile based services seamlessly and enhances the access to electronic services tremendously leveraging the very high penetration of mobile phones, especially in rural areas.

Mobile Seva enables the integration of the mobile platform with the common e-Governance infrastructure consisting of State Data Centers (SDCs), State Wide Area Networks (SWANs), State and National Service Delivery Gateways (SSDGs/NSDG). Availability of government-wide shared infrastructure and services enables rapid development and reduced costs for the departments in rolling out mobile based services.

As on date, 833 Central and state govt. departments are using Mobile Seva for providing SMS-based services, and over 55.25 Crore SMS notifications have been sent to citizens for various mobile based services. Citizens can now directly interact with government departments through SMS. As on date, 254 public services have been made available to the citizens.

A Mobile Applications Store (m-App Store) has also been developed by DeitY as part of Mobile Seva, which currently hosts over 240 live mobile applications. The live applications can be downloaded and installed free of cost on a mobile phone by any person.