Have you seen the television advertisements? A few village folk are beaming with pride on how they can now see progress of road construction in their village; peering into a smartphone and feeling like, yay, we have real time information on our fingertips. Well, that ad is all over the place. But, if you haven’t noticed, the Government of India has embarked on an ambitious program to appify itself.
App Sarkar
Government of India: The world’s biggest App Factory
The Indian government is on a massive mission to build apps. But our analysis of its efforts reveals that in its enthusiasm, it may be putting the app cart before the citizen horse.
Given the structure of the government — horizontal at the central level (ministries, departments) and vertical at the state and the local government level — everyone wants to have their say
The government's app push comes at a time when countries are looking the other way i.e. they have tried it and discarded it
Even a company with Flipkart's scale and resources realized that going app-only was sacrificing user reach (which in the government's case would be, citizen reach)
Apps, government officials believe, serve a completely different cause, or even a completely different audience. Apps even lead to easier recall.
