Andhra Pradesh plans to offer 100 citizen services on WhatsApp

Amaravati, Nov 8 (IANS) Andhra Pradesh will soon usher in WhatsApp governance with the government working to roll out at least 100 services through the free messaging and calling app. 

Chairing a meeting here, Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu on Friday asked officials to work on providing all kinds of services to citizens through WhatsApp.

Minister for Information Technology and Real Time Governance (RTG), Nara Lokesh, informed the Chief Minister that efforts are already on to bring at least 100 different services to the people through WhatsApp. Steps are also on to see to it that in another 90 days, the students get their academic qualification certificates through a QR code.

The officials brought to the notice of the Chief Minister that though there are guidelines that there is no need to submit physical certificates with digital signatures, a majority of the officers are not aware of this norm and thus they are demanding the students to submit physical certificates. The Chief Minister immediately told the officers to take steps to bring awareness on this among the students and officers. C

When the officials informed Naidu that data with regard to 40 lakh people in the state is still not available with them, he directed them to immediately collect the data and take steps to get it interlinked.

The Chief Minister also directed the officials to interlink all the houses in the state through Global Positioning System (GPS).

CM Naidu said that he is of the opinion that by intelinking the whole data, there will be transparency in the administration, thus there will be no room for corruption. Hence the officers should accelerate the process of data integration and complete it at the earliest possible.

The Chief Minister also directed the officials to see to it that every individual in the state gets Aadhaar and ensure that even the newly-born child should get the Aadhaar. The officers told the Chief Minister that the state government has 40 various departments and 500 TB data is available from 178 data fields in 128 various wings of the government.

Stressing that Real Time Governance should be the main data resource for the state government, he told the officials that the data of all the departments should be brought onto a common platform to interlink and through this data, all the schemes and other programmes being implemented by the state government should be analysed.

RTG should work as a support tool to help the ruling dispensation at all times, the Chief Minister said.

The citizens still have to make several rounds to the officers and to the government offices to get certificates like birth, death, residential, revenue, and academic qualification certificates, he said and stressed the need to mend this system.