Having being bombarded with ideas from public on governance issues, the Government now plans to streamline and analyse them in detail in order to provide “cumulative intelligence” to the top leadership. Government’s popular portal www.mygov.in, that engages citizens by seeking suggestions and ideas, will use these analysis to “assess the pulse of the nation.” Besides, the analysis of suggestions will be used to prepare executive summaries for various Ministries and departments for follow-ups. In fact, comments of similar nature on social media and web portals of major Indian news agencies will also be correlated now on to gauge public mood.
The website that was launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on July 26, 2014 to facilitate a dialogue between citizens and the Government now wants to go beyond just exchange of ideas. The portal mygov.in, run by Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY), at present has more than seven lakh users and claims to add about 20,000 new users every week which is why the need for streamlining was felt. Also, there are more than 25 Ministries onboard and more than 80 volunteers engaged with the platform.
As of now only a summary in less than 200 words is prepared based on the top comments on portal received and sent to the Ministries and Government leadership. In fact, PM Modi, often quotes suggestions from this portal in his public speeches and radio programmes. But this six-month-old portal now wants to graduate from basics to being hi-tech. In fact, the Twitter and Facebook accounts of all Ministries and departments will be soon interlinked with the mygov.in portal for better dissemination of information and connectivity with people.
It is learnt that mygov.in will also soon add a feature of geo-tagging as part of its discussions in order to get a specific information or the exact location of those sending suggestions. Besides features like most like comments and blacklisting of words that are abusive, vulgar, offensive, threatening or harassing, personal attacks will be done through effective moderation.
There are plans to identify new trends through keywords and tag clouds will be created from three sources — mygov.in data, social media, online media. These tag clouds will be coloured based on sentiments (negative, positive, neutral) of the analysed comments and will be updated on real-time basis on the portal. Besides, an open dashboard displaying multi-level real-time information on views of Government and people at different levels will be linked with the portal for detailing. For instance, on suggestions of having more hospitals there will be views of district, State and Ministry level presented on dashboards for people to know who says what. Mygov.in also has plans to include hashtags for users as part of their submissions for better categorisation of comments and user sentiments.
Some major activities taking place on the mygov.in includes discussion on various topics such as Swachchh Bharat, Digital India, caring for specially-abled etc. It also collaborates with multiple stakeholders such as citizens, volunteers, Ministries on key areas of development and governance. It is also a platform for Government to reciprocate on the ideas and suggestions received from citizens and inform citizens on the follow-up action and facilitates ministries to organise various contests for crowdsourcing creative ideas such as logo designs and taglines.
Besides, it also has an Open Forum for citizen feedback on issues that do not conform to any particular group, and opinion polls to gauge the pulse of the citizens over recent issues of public importance.