UMANG’s international version launched

To mark the occasion of 3 years of UMANG and 2000+ services milestone, an online conference was organized under the chairmanship of Shri Ravi Shankar Prasad, Union Minister for Electronics and Information Technology, Communications and Law & Justice on November 23, 2020.

UMANG’s international version was launched by Shri Ravi Shankar Prasad during the conference for select countries that include USA, UK, Canada, Australia, UAE, Netherlands, Singapore, Australia and New Zealand. It can be downloaded by going to the Play Store of specific countries.

Highlights

    • International version will help Indian international students, NRIs and Indian tourists abroad, to avail Government of India services, anytime.

    • It will also help in taking India to the world through ‘Indian Culture’ services available on UMANG and create interest amongst foreign tourists to visit India.

    • For NRIs abroad, to connect with India and maintain their contact with their roots Government services available on UMANG can play a very proactive role.

    • The cultural portfolio available on UMANG will be extremely useful for Indians abroad to pass on information on Indian culture and heritage to the next generation.

    • UMANG App has 2000+ services and are for different segments of society - farmers, students, culture, health, utility services, public grievances and citizen engagement, finance & banking, transport, services for women and children, youth skills and employment, police and legal services, MEA services, States Services etc.

    • On the 3rd anniversary, newly instituted UMANG Awards were given to Partner Departments of Centre and States based on the highest number of transactions across services.

    • EPFO was bestowed the Platinum Partner award, followed by DigiLocker as the Gold Partner while ESIC and Bharat Gas services were declared the Silver Partner; the Bronze Partner award was announced for HP Gas, Doordarshan, National Consumer Helpline, CBSE, Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana-Urban, Jeevan Pramaan & Jan Aushadhi Sugam.

    • For the services of State Governments, the top 3 States based on average monthly transactions were - Gujarat, Haryana and Madhya Pradesh.

About UMANG

UMANG (Unified Mobile Application for New-Age Governance) is one of the key initiatives under the Digital India program to develop a common, unified platform and mobile app to facilitate a single point of access to all government services. It is envisaged to act as a master application, which will integrate major government services from various sectors such Agriculture, Education, Health, Housing among others. The application will enable users to access e-Government services from the central Government, the State Governments, local bodies and their agencies.

It is all-in-one single, unified, secure, multi-channel, multi-lingual, multi-service mobile app.

Objective

        a. To act as an enabler and facilitator in developing overall mobile based service delivery ecosystem in India.

        b. Provide easy access for individuals to various services via single Mobile Application, easy to remember short code and single Toll Free number.

        c. Provide easy discoverability of services, easy manageability and standardisation of service delivery.

        d. Provide for quick mobile enablement of e-Gov applications/services of Government departments through easy and fast integration, on-boarding, mobile front-end roll-out by bringing their services on this mobile application platform. Provide another value added services to departments via a common platform through integration with Telecom Service Provider and Payment gateway.  This will facilitate easy on-boarding of Government departments. 

UMANG has now grown to provide 2039 services (373 from 88 Central departments, 487 from 101 departments of 27 States and 1,179 services for utility bill payments) and the count is galloping ahead! Over 3 years, UMANG has reached a level of more than 3.75 crore downloads and 2.5 crore registered users while maintaining an average Play Store rating of >4 from more than 136K users.

(The author is a trainer for Civil Services aspirants. The views expressed here are personal.)