SMS sent to people’s phones for government-related services will soon be recognized as official documents, provided they have been sent for citizen-service utilization. You can receive such text messages for tasks like making payments or registrations amongst other things under Mobile Seva, the newly introduced service.
A report on Times of India reveals that the Central government has already launched a platform that boasts of 241 applications. A pilot project of mobile governance was carried out initially and as many as 100 departments were taken into consideration for it. Services like RTI, Aadhaar, directory, health and education amongst others fall in the category.
Railways is one branch where text messages are considered valid tickets and the government wishes to bring the same convenience to all the sectors in the country, reveals J Satyanarayana, Secretary, Department of Electronics and IT. This was a much-required change considering that India already has over 90 crore mobile phone users.
And why only SMS, other modes of communication that are visible on a mobile phone should also be considered valid. These could include emails and may be even instant messengers. Digitally signed certificates are already recognized as valid documents.
In order to recognize a message as sent by the government, it needs to have a digital signature on it and we hear that it is ready to be used. These will be allocated to various departments in the first quarter of 2014. Messages featuring this signature or Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) will essentially be treated as a valid document or receipt.
As of now, Mobile Seva apps are available for Android and Java-based phones and they should be released for other devices very soon.