By Anand Parthasarathy
Bangalore: A broad spectrum of people-centric applications harnessing the mobile phone have been put in place by Kerala and many more, including mobile payment models are in the pipeline, the State revealed at an e-governance summit here.
Dr. Ajay Kumar, Principal Secretary (IT), Govt. of Kerala in a keynote at the Summit on e-Governance and Digitisation of Government organised by the Manufacturers' Association of Information Technology (MAIT) said, the state had registered a unique SMS short code - 537252 - for Kerala, which was available across the networks of all 13 telecom providers in the state. This would enable the state to offer a wide spectrum of services from SSLC results and agricultural alerts to emergency requirements of blood and citizen complaints to the police. A bulk SMS gateway had been created which allows government agencies to send instant alerts and communications in many verticals like media, farmers etc.
Other departments that harnessed this m-governance backbone were the KSRTC (for bus route information), KSEB for electricity billing, KWA (for water bills) and a dedicated website of Kerala Tourism for audio guides to places of interest.
In the pipeline were mobile applications for land tax collections, public distribution system and accelerating check post operations. Kerala's m-governance initiatives drew wide appreciation at the conference that was inaugurated by Karnataka Governor H R Bharadwaj.
Anand Parthasarathy is the Editor of the IndiaTechOnline portal and is based in Bangalore
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