E-governance Initiatives And The Mobile…

With the mobile subscriber base at around 200 million, as opposed to an Internet user base of around 36 million Internet users, the government seems more bullish on using mobile phones for achieving its e-governance objectives, reports the Economic Times. The report suggests that filling of forms, payment of utility bills and accessing information for land records etc will be facilitated by the mobile.
Update: The above figures have been corrected to accurately reflect the newspaper report. The number of mobile users are around 160 million), and as per the IAMAI-IMRB report (pdf), as of Sept ’06 38 million are ‘Ever Internet Users’ – people in India have ever used the in their lifetime, while 25 million are active Internet users, who access the Internet at least once a month.
Readers will recall that in the Union Budget, the Finance Minister increased allocation for e-governance to Rs.719 crore, Rs.500 crore of which will be allocated to State Governments. While there are plans to set up call centers to assist users, one must remember that communication via mobile devices has usability issues – particularly with low-end text-based handsets. In case of GSM, there are issues with GPRS. CDMA is restricted by the high cost of handsets, and the issue that changing handsets is an expensive matter. In case of GSM, the secondary market plays a key role in bringing down the price of handsets, but it takes its own time. I think that eventually, if e-governance initiatives are to go mobile, they will have to be based around mobile clients and not SMS.

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