India’s Mobile Governance Initiative (Mobile Seva) bags United Nations Public Service Award for 2014.

New Delhi: The United Nations Public Service Awards Programme (UNPSA), the most prestigious international recognition of excellence in public service, rewards the creative achievements and contributions of public service institutions to a more effective and responsive public administration in countries worldwide. Through an annual competition, the UNPSA promotes the role, professionalism and visibility of public service. It encourages exemplary public service and recognizes that democracy and successful governance are built on a competent civil service.

“Mobile Seva”, the national mobile governance initiative launched by Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY), Government of India, has bagged the second prize under the category on “Promoting Whole-of-Government Approaches in the Information Age” of the United Nations Public Service Awards, 2014. Mobile Seva is the only winner from India across all categories this year.

The “Mobile Seva” initiative of Government of India aims at mainstreaming mobile governance in the country as a compelling new paradigm for delivery of public services electronically through the mobile platform. DeitY launched “Mobile Seva” in 2011 as a new countrywide initiative on mobile governance to provide public services to the citizens through mobile phones and handheld devices. As a part of this initiative, a centralized platform named Mobile Service Delivery Gateway (MSDG) has been created to provide a one-stop solution to all the central and state government departments and agencies across the nation for all their mobile service delivery needs. The objective of the initiative is to provide a centrally hosted infrastructure and platform that allow all government departments and agencies to expeditiously start offering their services through mobile phones without having to invest heavily in creating their separate mobile platforms. The platform enables departments to provide their electronic services through various mobile based channels such as SMS, mobile apps, Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD), Interactive Voice Response System (IVRS) etc.

As on date, over 1000 government departments and agencies across the country have integrated their services with this platform and have delivered over 93 crore SMS based push transactions to citizens. 318 pull based services are also live on the platform/ The Mobile AppStore on MSDG hosts 300 live and fully integrated mobile apps for a wide range of public services. Real-time status and information is available round the clock on the Mobile Seva portal www.mgov.gov.in and through regular posts on social media (www.facebook.com/DIT.MGOV).