The Government of India uses Twitter effectively to communicate with citizens. Prime Minister Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) and his cabinet ministers use Twitter to share updates on economic development policies, make public announcements, and even use the platform to bring people together over a flagship campaign. Over the last 2 years, Twitter worked with various ministries on how they can increase their Twitter outreach and effectively manage the volume of Tweets coming in from citizens and developed a customised e-governance delivery service platform for the Indian government called Twitter Seva, an India-first innovation at Twitter. The multiple awards winning customer service delivery solution offers a mechanism to respond to public queries and grievances by helping process large volumes of Tweets, converting them into resolvable tickets, and assigning them to the relevant authority for real-time resolution. Twitter Seva is currently being used by the Ministry of Commerce (@DIPPGOI), Ministry of External Affairs (@MEAIndia), the Ministry of Railways (@RailMinIndia), Department of Telecommunications (@Dot_India) under the Ministry of Communication, as well as the Bengaluru Police (@BlrCityPolice). The Twitter Seva solution is now being adopted by thousands of official government accounts on Twitter and processing approximately 1 Million Tweets per month, with each Tweet stacking up as a metric of the government’s and various departments’ intent to deliver effective and transparent service.
Along the lines of Twitter Seva, a range of other civic Tech products have found success in India. #Breathe tells Indian citizens instantly what their air quality is like. What has led to the mass adoption of these products in India? Should platforms step in where Governments are struggling to scale their own e-governance solutions? Is their adoption by the government on the right side of vendor neutrality & interoperability frameworks? Raheel will try and answer some of these questions as he critiques his own work using policy & legal frameworks.