We are in a digital era, witnessing the pervasiveness and growth of mobile technology. The advancements have brought the internet within the reach of every human being. With the intense application of mobile technology, several mobile applications have been adding to the power and possible uses of the physical handheld device, be it in the form of as simple a task as looking up a phonebook, to staying connected with each other through audio & video calls. These mobile apps have been helping people to achieve even those tasks which were earlier done with the help of specialized devices such as cameras by allowing us to shoot instant pictures and recording the sights & sounds that surround us.
In government, the innate urge to discover and invent for delivering citizen-centric governance even at the grassroots level has been motivating us to constantly push the limits to what citizens or stakeholders can achieve with mobile apps! It is in this spirit that contests or hackathons are organized so that we can encourage developers of mobile apps to come forth for expanding the horizons of possibilities, and thus improve the quality of lives. Organizers, participants and audiences benefit from such contests by either being part of the journey to innovate and bring about quantum changes, or by getting inspired to do even better and keep surpassing past achievements.
Embracing the mobile first approach at the district level administrations, NIC has organised the District Governance Mobile Challenge (DGMC) recently. It is quite encouraging to see the overwhelming participation and responses received for this contest. The successful virtual event held for awarding its winners is yet another milestone achieved by NIC. DGMC aims at enabling mobile governance at the grassroots level. The virtual award ceremony is featured as the cover story of this issue of Informatics.
An array of interesting articles are covered in this issue. While Maharashtra and Punjab are the states featured this time, the three award winning districts covered are Hisar, Kozhikode and Shimla. The Technology Update section has Web Application Firewall and Object Detection Technologies as the featured articles. Online Key Management System for Driving License and Vehicle Registration and Certificate Generation Module through ServicePlus Framework are presented in the e-Gov Products & Services section. The regular feature, Appscape gives you brief of ten Apps introduced for citizens and stakeholders recently. The regular sections such as ‘Accolades’ and In ‘News Update’ have interesting updates on ICT advancements in Indian Government.
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