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.

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. In short, turn every other citizen service or interface into well, an app.

Its app factory, the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), located in Mumbai and Delhi, is churning out five or six apps every month.

AUTHOR

Venkat Ananth

Venkat is currently in his tenth year in journalism. Prior to The Ken, he was Deputy Content Editor at Mint as part of the newspaper’s digital team. He also wrote in-depth features on the business of sport for the newspaper. His earlier assignments include Yahoo! (as a columnist) and the Hindustan Times, where he began his career. Born in Mumbai, Venkat holds a Bachelor of Mass Media (Journalism) degree from SIES College of Arts, Science and Commerce, Mumbai and a Master of Arts degree in International Studies from Goldsmiths, University of London. He currently resides in New Delhi, where he moved nearly five years ago.

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