SMAC Driven Policy Making

http://www.livemint.com/Politics/bebH4at07MCmsvcT8cr7WM/Government-to-give-egovernance-a-SMAC-push.html

The government is firming plans to set up departments that will govern the use of social, mobile, analytics and cloud (SMAC) technologies as part of its efforts to drive the next phase of e-governance.

The Government has  come up with a package of ideas, which together is called EGP (e-governance programme) 2.0, or e-kranti. The information technology (IT) ministry is working with the states and some ministries in the Union government to adopt a set of procedures to grapple with entire suite of SMAC technologies.

“The government is the repository of the biggest ever data. There have been 2.85 billion transactions—double the size of the Indian population—between the government and citizens since last year. This underscores the need for analytics.

Mobility too is important since about five million people are being reached daily both by the federal and state governments through mobile programmes, including those in healthcare and education.

The IT ministry is also working to develop new cloud-based delivery models. The government has created a policy for cloud in May last year. Government launched the first phase, creating the cloud environment in their datacentre based in Delhi, with about Rs100 crore invested in it.

India has been surprisingly adept at adopting technologies as they emerge. India is one of the leading countries in use of statistics by the government for policy making. However, the Government has evolved to a stage where they don’t need to depend solely on statistical data for decision making. Given the proliferation of e-governance and other large systems that may reside outside the government, such as banks and telecom companies, we have significant direct data. Using analytics on this data gives the ability to provide personalized governance as well as help us have analytics driven policymaking.

As an example, the government can check the number of tourists in a particular area by merely checking the visitors location registry of telecom companies. This data would be invaluable for disaster management.