India has put a lot of emphasis on technological initiatives like Digital India and Smart City Mission. How can such technology be utilized to ensure transparency, accountability and efficiency? Discuss.

The initiatives such as Digital India and Smart India have the potential to transform the lives of citizens of India by improving transparency, accountability and efficiency in several ways. Both Digital India and Smart City Project have E-governance and empowering Indian citizens through technology as their key pillars.

• Many E-governance initiatives such as Mygov.in provide excellent platform for government to interact with citizens, thus promoting participatory governance and increased transparency and revolutionizing public service delivery. 
• Three main areas in Digital India- Infrastructure as a utility to every citizen, Governance & services on demand and Digital empowerment of citizens have a wide scope to promote efficiency and transparency in government services.
• E-governance helps to simplify the processes and makes government information more easily accessible for public sector agencies and citizens which in turn increases the efficiency of services.
• Great Participation of citizens is another advantage with these initiatives. Greater participation of citizens helps to improve accountability in the administration.
• By using technology, government also trying to minimize corruption. For example, POS machines based on Aadhar authentication are introduced in Public distribution system to increase efficiency of PDS by preventing leakages and also to prevent corruption.

This type of initiatives also helps citizens to know about their rights and also easy for them to access any information. This led to automatically accountable by the government.  Digital initiatives also led to digitally empowered panchayats which helps in ground level decision making in transparent manner.

Topics: GS-II: E Governance Applications Models Successes Limitations Potential