June 24: The week’s been an eventful one already, as we move slowly and surely toward the evening. I know how I like to spend mine sometimes – catching up on the ideas of the one gone by, especially at the weekends, those that continue to hum at the edges of my consciousness during the bustle of busy days. It helps to tidy the mess, restore order, recharge and replenish – building up to the challenges of the week ahead. It’s also a time to solve problems, fix things and build up to the next big idea at work.
How about doing that on a larger scale in the next few days?
Perhaps you’ve heard of the Innovate for Digital India Challenge? I’m sure most of you have heard of MyGov – the Government of India’s unique citizen engagement and crowdsourcing platform that allows you to let your imagination run free – to come up with a wide array of governance ideas across government projects and activities – from budget planning to designing logos, creating taglines and coming up with ideas to address the pressing problems that often complicate the life of ordinary Indians like you and me.
The Innovate for Digital India Challenge aims to foster technology innovation to build products that can help scale technology adoption in India The challenge was designed in collaboration with the Department of Science and Technology (DST), with support from the Department for Electronics and Information Technology, MyGov.in, and will be managed by IIM Ahmedabad’s Centre for Innovation Incubation and Entrepreneurship (CIIE).
The idea is simple: it’s a PPP to create solutions that address local development problems. It aims to encourage the creation of intuitive, easy-to-use solutions that can increase access to critical services that are crucial for development. Eventually the best ideas will get help for commercialisation leading to the creation of a local technology ecosystem furthering the government’s Make in India vision.
How can you innovate frugally, within the Indian ecosystem while adapting to the Indian lifestyle? Its innovation focus is on two broad areas: creation of the ideal citizen’s device platform; and innovation to deliver key applications to accelerate the delivery of e-governance services on a mobile platform.
We’ve long lived with a division of labour that is sometimes defined by expertise, age, or sometimes an old bureaucratic favourite:
locus standi. What’s great about the premise of MyGov, as well as this challenge itself, is that it does not set a bar on age or occupation. All you need to be is an Indian citizen armed with an idea and a passion for change.
Technology has blown so many of our boundaries, and the imbalances they often create, right out of the water. Gone are the days of writing a steady stream of ‘letters to the editor’; now we can address the PM directly on a social media platform!
The platform has over 9.4 lakh registered users, over 1.2 lakh submissions across 179 tasks and the Challenge itself has generated a slew of submissions. A recent invitation to give ideas for a PMO app had over 9000 approved submissions, when it was finally closed for appraisal.
The success of MyGov seems to be a testament to the power of ideas and of those willing to share them to make a bigger difference.
With an extended deadline and still four days to go before entries close, how about sharing that big (or powerfully small) idea?
