Potential use of Mobile technology

Mobile technology is growing at a large scale with expansion of smart phones. Presently, this has empowered people by way of ease of access to various facilities. More than 1.91 billion people are using smartphones across the world. The users count is going to increase to 2.16 billion in 2016 and 2.56 billion in 2018.¹ The inexpensive smart phones are increasing the number of internet users. This has resulted in to emerging exponential growth of m-commerce.  Now, it is very easy to download apps for health, agriculture, education, business, news, travel, tourism, games, books, entertainment and all kinds of marketing. M-banking has further eased the commercial operations. However, its potential use in better community development and efficient governance (may be called as m-governance) is yet to be fully utilized. Some of the governance issues can be easily resolved with mobile technology coupled with social media tools:

• A person walking in streets notices path hole or broken road or accumulation of garbage or any other civic matters can report it using SeeClickFix app. It is user friendly with geotag facility. The app has inbuilt facility to forward your complaint to appropriate Government authority for necessary action. Georgia state administration is using similar apps.
• White house is using Facebook, twitter, Instagram and YouTube to connect with people. Various government departments are using it for feedback purposes only. However, its potential use could have been to access to service delivery. The service response time can be significantly reduced if these social media tools are also used as button to switching over to service sites of Government.
• In education and health sector it has been very useful. The students are getting timely notification about assignments, scheduled examinations and report about any emergency. The people are getting timely health checkup notifications.
• Alerts on flight current status and train running status are saving a lot of time.
• The weather report in mobile is helping farmers in protecting their crops.

India is the second largest market in mobile connections in the world. It has a lot of potential for m-governance. Government of India has started using mobile technology under Digital India programme in service delivery like maadhhar, eaadhaar and digital life certificate (Jeevan Praman). However, a lot of transformation is required for m-governance.

1. http://www.emarketer.com/Article/2-Billion-Consumers-Worldwide-Smartphones-by-2016/1011694