Page 158 - Connecting cities and communities with the Sustainable Development Goals

United for Smart Sustainable Cities
Connecting cities and communities with the Sustainable Development Goals

2.3 Results
The Government of India’s solution to launch the MyGov portal turned out to be a path-breaking move for a
developing country like India.
The MyGov portal is certainly sustainable. This portal is expected to become a benchmark for future
governance systems, wherein the government can receive direct feedback from their citizens. It is still early
days for the MyGov portal and it is not possible to deem this portal a major success. Given the large-scale
involvement of citizens in this portal, a transparent system needs to be put into place to ensure that the
feedback received is adequately taken into account and acted upon within a defined time frame to prevent
delays.
In the coming years, if this portal is able increase the current rate of engagement on the site, a similar model
could be implemented in other developing countries to improve accountability and action, in view of SDG 17.

3 Conclusions

Based on the positive response to the MyGov portal, it is acknowledged that citizens can be actively involved
in the decision-making process for making cities dynamically respond to the needs of the citizens and aim for
sustainability. As can be deduced from the results of this case study, it is possible to get citizens more involved
in governance.

The critical success factors have been the leadership at the government level, along with the involvement of
the youth in the process of interacting with the various stakeholders in the government.

The challenges are that in developing nations like India, there is a good section of the population, who are
not literate could have a problem in making use of this portal, though there is a feature for audio contribution
in the regional languages.

It is easily possible to replicate this concept at the city level and import it to other countries which are looking
to improve participatory governance.

Given the amount of frugal resources required for implementation at the city level, this project is easily
scalable.

A References

MyGov Portal. https://mygov.in (accessed 10 January 2017)

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