SMS to be soon accepted as official Docs in Govt dealings in India

MSs will soon be acceptable as "documentary proof" for a variety of citizen-services ranging from making payments to registrations.

  

People may soon be able to use SMSs as documentary proof with government departments. The government is launching a 'Mobile Seva' service with over 241 applications relating to health, Aadhaar, Education, RTI, and much more.

Launching the 'Mobile Seva' service, Department of Electronics and IT secretary J Satyanarayana said: "Like Railways, we have to bring in a system wherein by showing (transaction) SMS or, whatever be the case (like e-mail), the proof on mobile is accepted as valid document. To increase our reach we need to bring this kind of practice in mobile and e-governance."

India has over 90 crore mobile subscribers and with the launch of this app it will be easy for them to make transactions with various government departments. At present the digitally signed certificates are accepted as valid document and soon an SMS or a communication available on mobile phone will be accepted as valid proof.

Joint Secretary at DEITY Rajendra Kumar stated that the department is ready with digital signature for mobile phones that the government can use in messages that are to be sent to the citizens applying for a service. "We will start allocating digital signature (Public Key Infrastructure) to all government department on board in first quarter of 2014. Government departments can send communication on mobile of citizen seeking service," Kumar said. DEITY Additional Secretary Rajiv Gauba stated that about 830 departments from the Centre, state and local authorities have come on board, and the department is working on the third phase to further scale up the mobile governance platform and bring more services under its ambit.

"We have to go through inter-ministerial consultations to scale this m-governance store for launch of third phase. The third phase will have many more departments and capacity to add more services application on this store. Final shape of third phase can be known only after consultation process is complete," he said.

The app is available for Android and Java enabled phones for now. Kumar added that the department is aiming to bring all the applications to HTML5 standard which will make them compatible with all mobile platforms in the next six months.