SMS GoI :)

Indias citizens are far too distant from their government. They approach it as supplicants,pleading for the services and information that its various organs are supposed to provide as their right,anyway. This distancing breeds anger,and then in the case of the empowered middle class contempt for those who they feel are monopolising what the state provides,those skimming off the benefits of governance. The inchoate anger against corruption that we have all had to deal with recently originates not just in an inability to see how our democracy is functioning,but also in a sense,common among Indias citizens,that we are still subjects of an unfriendly leviathan of a state.

It is incumbent upon those who care about governance and about the framework that sustains our democracy,therefore,to work out how to narrow that distance. One such effort is on,The Financial Express reported on Tuesday,in the Centres department of information technology. A policy framework is to be released,we are told,that will ensure that mobile phones will be able to provide public services and information. To start with,all government websites will be made mobile-compliant not an easy task,one imagines,given their ugly,buggy,slow and sarkari nature. There already is a National eGovernance Plan,which links several websites that claim to be able to tell you the status of your passport or PAN card application,check agricultural prices,file for a death certificate,or check land records. (Not all of these work.) What is necessary,however,is to broaden the scope of what can be done online and,as this new policy would do,ensure that it is accessible even to those who do not have access to an Internet-ready computer.

Various states and Central departments have shown the way. In Kerala,information about local public health resources is available on the phone. The Goa government uses SMS alerts for various services in a big way; the Central passport office and the Railways have figured out how to use SMSes as well. Two-thirds of Indians have mobile phones.

All of them think the state is too remote. Here is a gap crying out to be bridged.