m- powering generation Z! – The citizens of emerging Knowledge Society (February 2007)

m- Powering generation Z! – The citizens of emerging knowledge society

At a time when Europe and many developed countries are struggling with the challenges of an ageing society, India has 55% of its population under the age of 25 (That’s 555 million people!). The models for Electronic Public Services we are planning and deploying now would be delivering services to this generation. The new generation is extremely comfortable with using mobile and wireless devices and these have become the part of their lifestyle. They have been using these devices in many innovative ways (The recent spurt on the SMS polls run on the TV channels from political issues to the selection of top news are the proof). This generation in near future will represent a major section of the voters as well as the leaders.

This provides with an unprecedented opportunity as well as responsibility for the policy makers to design the services that will reflect their aspirations and lifestyle. Since most of the developing countries are at the initial levels of their e-Government maturity curve, there is no risk of having to dump the legacy systems which is very much a concern for the developed countries. Moreover, mobile government developments have just started world over providing an opportunity to lead this wave of development given the superiority of our IT talent pool. The good part about deploying mobile services is that we have a huge domestic market available which will ensure that the applications/services developed in the domain will have the subscribers readily available thus ensuring sustainability. Most of the e-Government programs are struggling with the issue of low take-up by the intended users the main reason for which is low penetration of computers and the literacy among the users. Imagine adding 6 million subscribers of the government services (at least informational services) every month (That’s the number of subscribers Indian mobile industry is now adding every month). The prospects of sustainability of such services are evident. A recent mobile based service rolled out by Government of Karnataka “providing SMS alert regarding any land transaction registered at the government office to the land owners” provided the state government with enough subscription fee that can sustain the service for many years!

It is equally true that anytime-anywhere services that can be provided using mobile/wireless technologies are not only beneficial to the government, they present a tremendous opportunity to the telecom players and application providers to benefit from this huge market that is growing everyday provided they can collaborate with the government agencies through innovate Public Private partnership models.

I would like to appeal to all the stakeholders involved (Government , MDAs, academia, industry and civil society) to join together in investigating the potential as well as challenges offered by this new and powerful media for dissemination of information and delivery of services.

In order to facilitate a discussion the among the stakeholders and discuss models of partnership among Government, Industry and Multilateral Development agencies , we are organizing a conference titled “m-GovWorld 2007” on April 27-28 in New Delhi, India.

Mobile Government is bound to be inevitable part of the all inclusive e-Government services as mobile technologies are already mainstreamed into the life of generation Z – our future citizens. Let’s invent the future!

Vikas Kanungo

Chief Editor (Government@24/7)

February 15, 2007