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With over 1.25 Billion people, the only sustainable means in India for delivering services from the government to the citizens in a transparent and timely manner is through the Internet. This makes the need for a designing Citizen Experience with the least common denominator in mind a strategic imperative for PM Narendra Modi’s Digital India.

The Internet has  in recent years emerged as a great leveller. It cuts across all of the traditional divisions and segments of society and is the most equitable means of providing access to government services at all levels.  A greater government focus of leveraging the power of this medium was long overdue. To address this need, our prime minister, Shri Narendra Modi, launched the Digital India initiative with great fanfare this past week and also laid out a grand vision this program is intended to achieve on many dimensions from rural health and education to manufacturing and financial inclusion.

However in the midst of all this euphoria and back slapping on the possibilities, I find it a little disconcerting that there seems to be little explicit focus on the concept of citizen experience.

Digital India must be Citizen-centric

Aren’t the citizens of the nation the primary “customers” of all government services and shouldn’t their experience in accessing and using these many digital services be the primary design point of any government initiative, especially one as far reaching as this one?  The spending vows received by the government from just the initial launch are around $70 Billion.  At this level of spending, shouldn’t we at least make an attempt at defining what kind of experience Digital India will deliver for its citizens?

To borrow from business, the starting point for defining the desired experience is an understanding of the target customers.

Profiling the citizen

Here are two facts to consider:

  • Demographically speaking, Over 50% of citizens are below the age of 25 and over 65% below the age of 35 & over 70% of citizens live in rural areas
  • Technologically speaking, we have over 300 Million Internet users and a billion mobile phone users

When these two factors are combined together it is obvious that the majority of users of any of the digital services launched by the government will primarily be young rural Indians with a mobile phone, increasingly a smart phone and any service that does not perform in this context is likely to find a very muted level of adoption.  In the world of internet, the 2 second rule, is law.  Deliver or fail to gain traction with your users.

So what then, are the challenges, in delivering digital services to far flung rural areas of India on a mobile phone?

Challenges for digital delivery of citizen experiences

The three primary challenges of delivering digital services over the internet are reliability, performance and security. When you add in the mix of distance, low bandwidth speeds and the bewildering variety of mobile devices used to access the internet in India, the challenges are even more profound. [For the geeky reader, this provides a technical view on what it takes to route information around the challenges posed by the internet]

According to Akamai’s State of the Internet report, Q1 2015, the average Internet connection speed in India was 2.3 Mbps which still ranks 115th globally in terms of Average Connection Speed. Only 9.9% of the Internet connections in India have 4 Mbps speed or more, and 1.8% of the Internet connections in India have 10 Mbps or more. The report also calls out the fact that China and India are the top two Asian countries in terms of source traffic for denial of service attacks on the web.

A roadmap for a Citizen Centric Digital Experience

So any government digital initiative that seeks to gain wide spread adoption must fundamentally address these core challenges of performance, reliability and security if they are to have any success in being widely adopted by the citizens of the country.

In the upcoming blogs / articles, I will explore in greater detail the implications of trying to deliver an excellent digital citizen experience covering a range of topics including cyber security and privacy, impact of performance on adoption of services and analyse specific initiatives such as the Digital Locker, eHealth, Make in India and distance education.

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Autor(en)/Author(s): Srinivas Padmanabharao

Quelle/Source: Niticentral, 13.07.2015

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