Citizens today expect increasingly transparent, accessible and responsive services from the public sector. To deliver on those rising expectations, the government is working on several projects, in public-private partnership with foremost technology service providers, using next generation technology to improve the delivery of citizen services in India.

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The third and last episode of ‘Byte Talks’, a campaign by Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and Intel, powered by CNBC-TV18, featured three domain experts – Som Satsangi, MD, HPE; Dr. Saurabh Garg, CEO, UIDAI and Roshni Das, Sr. Regional Marketing Director and General Manager, APJ Marketing, Intel Solutions and Service. Moderated by CNBC-TV18’s Reema Tendulkar, they discussed the current state of citizen services in India, how key stake holders are adopting a more holistic approach to digital transformation and the role of technology in continuously improving the value to citizens, among other related issues.

Dr. Saurabh Garg set the tone for the discussions by clarifying the government’s larger vision and the challenges it faced in achieving it. He explained, “The government’s broad vision for the digital sector is to ease the lives of citizens. It aims to ensure that all government services are delivered digitally, unless by their very nature they cannot be or if there are legal impediments. To ensure universal digital access, the government has a very clear road map for increasing digital access and internet connectivity in remote areas.”

He went on to talk about the challenges that Covid19 presented the government, like the inability to have in-person services delivered to citizens. In response, the government had taken the proactive steps, using deep technology solutions, on the strength of infrastructure, like the Aadhaar Payment Bridge (APB) for direct transfers, to achieve touch-less, cashless delivery of services.

Som Satsangi assured that like the government, HPE’s core purpose was to advance the way people live and work. He proudly shared that the company had a track record of over two decades of working very deeply in India, touching the lives of citizens every day, in some way or the other. He recounted instances of working together with central and state governments, the Indian Railways, PSEs like banks, Oil & Gas companies and other critical public undertakings due to HPE’s ability to power the core infrastructure of large government establishments. He also mentioned HPE’s role in supporting everything from academia and Smart City solutions to weather forecasting, disaster management, cyclone alerts, etc., all towards enhancing growth and improving the quality of life.

“We provide solutions on open stack cloud platforms to ensure scalability, redundancy, low latency and the security of citizen-centred data, which are all crucial criteria for a country like India,” he said. “We have introduced new age architecture, including cloud platforms, required by many government organizations at an accelerated pace, to enhance citizen confidence and provide the right set of interfaces between the government and citizen services.”

Roshni Das outlined the role technology can play in enabling citizen services saying, “Technology is an equality leveler, it enables ease of services and innovation at scale. For any citizen services technology to be considered effective, it must deliver on these three promises.”

She appreciated the recent budget’s focus on technology-enabled development as a key pillar for future progress. “The budget has positioned technology at the heart of citizen services, economic schemes, direct to consumer initiatives, etc. and the more we place technology at the centre of experiences, the more proliferation can happen,” she said. “We are also happy to see that ‘data centres’ has been given infrastructure status in this the budget. We, at Intel, have been powering technology infrastructures through a breadth of portfolio solutions and this proposal will encourage development of the right infrastructure.”

She discussed Intel’s contribution to various epic pan-India projects in partnership with the government, notable among which were UIDAI and more recently, CoWIN. She also mentioned other pieces that the company was looking at undertaking with the government, in critical spheres like healthcare and education.

With respect to promising technologies at the forefront of the current revolution, she explained that just like digitalization today, ‘AI-zation’ (rapid adoption of AI) would become an unstoppable trend in the near future. She highlighted various training initiatives Intel has spearheaded in association with policy makers, to promote national digital literacy and skilling towards facilitating use of technology.

To conclude, the astute panel of industry practitioners highlighted the criticality of technology in ensuring transparency, accountability and convenience in various citizen services. They explained its role in streamlining processes and building trust and credibility, while ensuring privacy and confidentiality of data and improving the level and quality of services by the government.

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First Published:Mar 30, 2022 12:02 PM IST