Accelerating public service delivery in India
Charru Malhotra, Rashmi Rani Anand
Abstract
The application of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in the public sector can usher performance enhancement, productivity and social equity in public service delivery mechanisms. More specifically, emerging digital technologies including Artificial Intelligence (AI) can be employed for more effective retrieval and analysis of complex, real-time data that could also be captured and shared by devices supporting Internet of Things. Literature asserts that governments worldwide must adopt solutions offered by these emerging technologies to drive innovation in public service delivery mechanisms. Appreciating these claims, this study aims to explore the current and potential use of IoT and AI. Based on the related review of literature, the study puts forth a conceptual framework for creating an open and integrated national level agriculture stack (christened as KisanOne by the authors) so that developing countries like India can effectively espouse data driven approach in its agriculture sector. "Kisan One" combines varied aspects of a farmers' activities including weather forecast, soil health indices, seed procurement cycle, sowing cycles, details of fertilizers availability, crop prices, etc, in a unified national stack that is accessible to all the stakeholders using application programming interfaces (APIs). Needless to say, the proposed KisanOne is a utopian implementation where existing and contemporary digital initiatives get unified on a single platform.Datasets themselves have little intrinsic value sans any ability to extract meaning from it. Intelligent data analytics could be employed on real time datasets of KisanOne both for evidence based decision making as well as for malicious intent. This paper, therefore, attempts to offer an insight into such challenges as well as suggest policy recommendations that could strengthen existing regulatory mechanisms for effective implementation of IoT and AI in existing public service delivery schemes of India. The paper is divided into four broad sections. The first section builds the Background of the paper. The next section is divided into four subsections and in this section instance of Agriculture has been detailed with reference to its current scenario and prevailing solutions. India has started using technology in Agriculture to a great extent- some of these applications such as Kisan Suvidha2 mobile app, mKisan SMS Portal, Farmer's Portal, Soil Health Card, Fertilizer Monitoring System(FMS) software, Agrimarket App have been delineated in the study. A use case on transformation of agriculture sector using IoT and AI is also presented in one of the sub-sections. A National Level Integrated Agriculture Stack is also proposed in this paper. The subsequent section presents brief picture of key challenges of implementing IoT and AI in Agriculture sector followed by recommendations and Consulive Remarks. It is an innovative and descriptive study that primarily relies on secondary data gleaned from international/national journals, reports of Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, Government of India and other online academic sources coupled with creative out-of-box thinking to propose the application of IoT and AI in varied public sectors with special emphasis on Agriculture.