Focus: GS-III Science and Technology
Why in news?
The National e-Governance Division (NeGD), Ministry of Electronics & IT (MeitY) has signed an MOU with CSC (Common Service Center) e-Governance Services India Limited, to facilitate delivery of UMANG services at CSCs, in an assisted mode, thereby making services on UMANG app available to citizens through the network of 3.75 lakh CSCs.
Details
- The CSC operators Village Level Entrepreneurs (VLEs) will enable citizens to avail e-Governance services of 140 Departments through the UMANG App.
- This will benefit those citizens who either do not have access to smartphones or are not comfortable accessing App based e-services on their own.
- For the masses, this will not only enhance access to government services significantly, but also expand the gamut of services that VLEs offer citizens, thereby increasing their income and viability.
- All these UMANG services are being enabled on CSCs without any additional cost and NeGD is making all services available to CSCs at zero cost.
Common Services Centres (CSCs)
- Common Services Centres or CSCs, set up under the CSC Scheme of MeitY, are physical facilities for delivering Government of India e-Services to rural and remote locations where availability of computers and Internet was negligible or mostly absent.
- They are multiple-services-single-point model for providing facilities for multiple transactions at a single geographical location.
- CSCs are the access points for delivery of essential public utility services, social welfare schemes, healthcare, financial, education and agriculture services, apart from host of B2C services to citizens in rural and remote areas of the country.
- It is a pan-India network catering to regional, geographic, linguistic and cultural diversity of the country, thus enabling the Government’s mandate of a socially, financially and digitally inclusive society.
Umang App
- UMANG is a Government of India all-in-one single, unified, secure, multi-channel, multi-platform, multi-lingual, multi-service mobile app, powered by a robust back-end platform providing access to high impact services of various organization (Central and State).
- The Prime Minister launched the UMANG App in 2017 to bring all government services on a single mobile app, with a larger goal to make the government accessible on the mobile phone of our citizens. About 660 services from 127 department & 25 states, including utility payments are live and more are in pipeline.
- India Meteorological Department (IMD) has taken various initiatives in recent years for improvement in dissemination of weather forecast and warning services based on latest tools and technologies. To further enhance this initiative, IMD has taken the leverage of Digital India Programme to utilise “UMANG App”.
- The app, available for both Android and iOS devices would give users access to most of the government services. It includes scholarships, women safety, health care, e-District, Passport Seva and others.
