Page 254 - ITU-T Focus Group Digital Financial Services – Executive Summary

1 Introduction

1.1 Background

India has launched its 100 smart city mission in 2015. This initiative strives to make 100 cities across the
country more sustainable using technology. Within this initiative, India also plans to make their cities more
citizen centric. The Mygov (https://www.mygov.in/) portal was created for this purpose. This portal has
proved to be a very effective tool in people’s participation in governance. For a country of the size of India,
with 1.25 Billion people with diverse background, this portal is quite a success as can be seen from the
number of engagements on the site itself.

India has a large number of cities with population above 1 million. Ensuring that the Government involves
people in the process of governance in a democratic setup, this type of portal seems to be quite effective
way forward. This model can be replicated at the city level for local governance for Smart Sustainable Cities.
In a city like New Delhi, which happens to be the capital of the largest democracy in the world, influx from
other parts of the country is imperative. As New Delhi has been expanding due to increasing population, the
infrastructure has come under tremendous pressure. Designation of the National Capital Region, allows for
adjoining cities to share the population burden of the capital. However, with the passage of time, even these
adjoining cities have come under similar circumstances vis-à-vis population growth.

1.2 Challenge and response

The challenge in a developing economy like India is to meet the aspirations of the 1.25 billion people with a
population of more than 800 million people below the age of 35. Being a democracy, getting feedback from
the stakeholders, improving accountability and taking corrective or preventive action, as needed, is essential.

More than 400 million people live in cities, and the number of cities in India with a population of more than
5,00,000 are more than 100. Getting citizen’s participation in the governance of the cities would make the
cities more accountable and easy to receive feedback on services through portals of this kind. As such the
mygov portal is able to ensure that the genuine suggestions are honoured and implemented. The feedback
mechanism on this portal is also able to foster reliability within the urban governance structure.

2 The Project(s)

2.1 Vision and content
The Vision behind the setting up of this portal is to translate the aspirations of the majority citizens in a city
into implementable projects and programs and also obtain feedback of the citizens about the projects and
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program since implemented as envisioned in Sustainable Development Goal 17 .
The portal has got more than 50 open groups for facilitating discussions including:
 Smart Cities
 Consumer Protection

 Human Resource Development
 Disaster Management
 Skill Development

 Digital India
 Energy Conservation

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53 Strengthen the means of implementation and revitalize the global partnership for sustainable development

250 U4SSC series