Maharashtra Government to adopt mGovernance

Mobile penetration in villages has led the Maharashtra Government to adopt mGovernance as a tool to reach out to the farthest corner of the state. The Government has decided to provide various services to citizens via mobile devices. Guidelines for mobile governance or mGovernnance have already been issued by the Department of Information Technology (DIT) to all the departments.

DIT has specially stressed that departments should not restrict their mGovernance to urban areas but also extend it to remote rural areas where people have mobiles.

As per the guidelines, websites of all the departments should be mobile compliant using "One Web" approach. One web refers to making same information and services available to users, in spite of different devices they use.

Open standards must be adopted for mobile applications to ensure interoperability of applications across various operating systems and devices. For convenience, single pre-designated numbers (long and short codes) should be used for mobile-based services.

Through SMS, departments can circulate information related to government resolutions (GRs), circulars, office orders, etc. For deployment of mobile application for delivering citizen services, each department should use the delivery channels like SMS gateways and unstructured supplementary service data (USSD) provided by DIT in cooperation with Mahaonline Ltd.