Punjab CM launches digital ‘PR Insight’ mobile app and web portal platform

Chandigarh: In another major push towards Digital Punjab, Chief Minister Captain Amarinder Singh on Wednesday launched Mobile Application and web portal ‘PR Insight’ to monitor the feedback and subsequently improve the delivery of citizen centric services to ensure responsive and transparent administration in the State.

Notably, PR Insight application has been developed by the Information & Public Relations Department to provide single repository & dashboard of all the news articles & social media posts of the State. As many as 31 leading Newspaper agencies/portals have been integrated online with PR Insight application & portal and all the State Departments’ news articles are fetched from these newspaper agencies on real time basis.  This single repository of news articles and social media posts are then analysed using advance analytics and sentiment analysis tools to understand citizen feedback on Government policies and perception of Governance by the citizens.

Speaking on the occasion, Captain Amarinder Singh said that this novel app/portal would be instrumental to audit the feedback of masses in an efficacious manner so as to enable the State Government to remove deficiencies in the ongoing pro-people policies and programmes. The sole objective of PR Insight is to re-orient the existing schemes and programmes to the people’s satisfaction after meticulously monitoring their feedback.

Appreciating the stupendous efforts of PR Department for taking this unique initiative, the Chief Minister further said that the PR Insight app would certainly help the State administration to further bring efficiency in its functioning besides fulfilling the aspirations of masses in seamlessly providing citizen centric services.

Meanwhile, Secretary, Information and Public Relations Department, Gurkirat Kirpal Singh apprised the Chief Minister that PR Insight Mobile Application and portal shall help Government to fine-tune its policies to address specific concern, transform communication and out-reach programmes to clear any misconceptions, provide with insights on how its programmes and initiatives are perceived by its key stakeholders. The app would also enable the Government to identify best practices from positively perceived programmes and replicate it in others, design an effective performance model and formulate a comprehensive social business strategy.

The Secretary further said that till last year, the news collation was a manual exercise wherein a specific team within Information and Public Relations Department analysed the clippings of printed version of newspaper and prepared the clippings for minute perusal by senior functionaries of the Government. It was with a view to improve the efficiency of process related to manual collation of news, cutting/pasting of news from printed newspapers and sending to concerned officials, PR Insight has been launched, said Secretary who also added that this app has automated the process of news collation, analysis of news and sentiment analysis.

Dwelling upon the salient features of the app, the Director, Information and Public Relations Department, Ravi Bhagat said that this unique platform is a single portal for all department news and auto-collates news from 31 news agencies. This portal would lead to auto segregation of positive, negative and neutral news, auto-categorization of news publication, district & department wise besides social media integration (Twitter and Facebook) for sentimental analysis and online feedback mechanism for negative news to newspapers agencies.

All the Public Relations officials of the department have been trained to view dashboard, review news stories, analyse the news stories and final verification process. With time and machine learning, a robust system shall be developed which would improve the overall efficiency of news collation, news analysis, news categorization and sentiment analysis. All the Departments have been provided with username and password to monitor the news and social media coverage of their own.

The departments shall have options to provide feedback to news agencies wherever required to clarify the facts against news articles or social media posts by citizens, Bhagat added.

Pertinently, Information and Public Relations Department shall also use ‘PR Insight’ application for social media analysis for Government Departments. Advance sentimental analysis tools have been used for integration of Social media handles of Government with PR insight. The Punjab Government shall constantly keep a tab on pulse of its citizens for better Governance and Social media sentiment analysis tool would be used to understand how citizens feel about its programmes & policies.

Likewise, the Government agencies would focus on following from the sentiment analysis of news posts and social media posts.