India has the fastest growing telecom network in the world credited to its high population and development potential. The total number of telephones in the country stands at 957.61 million, while the overall tele-density has increased to 76.75% as of 30th September 2014. The total number of mobile phone subscribers has reached 930.20 million during the same period. With growing emphasis on providing online Government services through web based interface on 24x7 basis, the need to provide these services on the smart phones has increased. Since Android OS based smart phones are the most popular phones in India, NIC Himachal Pradesh has developed multiple mobile apps for citizens, employees, pensioners, press and Government officials, which are easy to use on mobile devices.
The idea behind coming up with mobile apps is to supplement the existing information available on various websites to the stakeholders on their hand-held devices in such a manner that any novice can easily make use of this important information.
ANDROID APPS All the apps, developed by NIC Himachal Pradesh, can be downloaded through the official website of the Himachal Pradesh Government at http://himachal.nic.in (Mobile Apps section) from the Google Play Store.
The objective of all these apps is to enable wider reach and easy accessibility of Government information and service. As smart phones are normally available with citizens and employees, with these apps they don’t have to depend upon others or costly PC/laptops for accessing such important information. An important feature of all these apps is that they enable offline browsing in almost all cases. Users can download the updated content whenever Internet connectivity is available for viewing at later stages.
TECHNOLOGY Developing mobile apps is a time consuming and storing the data within app to provide information even in offline mode is a challenging task. It is planned to provide these apps on all platforms namely Windows and iOS in addition to Android. The apps are developed in JAVA (android SDK) using Eclipse IDE with android virtual device plugin. The database being used for offline storage of data is SQLite. Its main components are:
Applications It is the top most layer and all the applications are to be installed on this layer only. Application components are the essential building blocks of an Android App. These components are loosely coupled by the Application Manifest File, AndroidManifest.xml, which describes each component of the application and how they interact.
Application Framework Application Frameworks are the blocks that the mobile apps directly interact with. These programs manage the basic functions of a phone like resource management, voice call management etc. These are the basic tools with which the developers build their applications. Important blocks of Application Framework are Activity Manager, Content Providers, Telephony Manager, Location Manager, Resource Manager, etc.
Libraries and Runtime This is the layer that enables mobile devices to handle different types of data. These libraries are written in C or C++ language and are specific for a particular hardware. Important blocks of this layer are Surface Manager, Media Framework, SQLite, WebKit and OpenGL. Android Runtime consists of Dalvik Virtual Machine and Core Java libraries.
Linux kernel The Linux kernel provides basic system functionality of process management, memory management, device management for camera, keypad, display etc. The kernel also handles all the things that Linux is really good at such as networking and a vast array of device drivers, which take the pain out of interfacing to peripheral hardware.
WAY FORWARD Presently, the apps are available for Android platform but iOS and Windows Apps are under development to expand the user base. The new apps planned include: yyLand Records, Record of Rights (Jamabandi) and Shajra Nasb based on Tehsil, Village, Khasra/Khatouni and Khewat yyCircle Rates App for registration fee/stamp duty calculation yyMunicipal Corporation Shimla-Citizen Services yyMyDiarY App for important administrative contacts at Head Office and filed level and departmental engagements of officers yyTourism App for Himachal Pradesh considering that the state has enough tourism potential yyGrievance Redressal Status/Alerts and its linking with Public Service Guarantee Act.
For further information: AJAY SINGH CHAHAL Senior Technical Director & SIO NIC, Himachal Pradesh E-mail- ajay.chahal@nic.in