Now, get birth certificate on your mobile

Project to be rolled out first in Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore; rest of India to be covered over two years. Chetan Chauhan reports.

Updated on: Feb 12, 2012, 01:39:51 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Soon, getting a birth certificate or a school mark sheet, or transferring money from one bank account to another, will be possible with the click of a button on your mobile phone.

The service will be rolled out in major cities such as Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore and some rural areas by March. The rest of the country will be covered over the next two years.

The service will be made available by the department of information technology’s project called e-pramaan. As the name suggests, e-pramaan is aimed at authenticating a mobile phone user so that he can avail of government services on his mobile phone. "The mobile number would work to prove the genuineness of an applicant," a government official said.

A person who registers for e-pramaan services will be given an m-pin (mobile personal identification number), generated by the national e-governance platform. This unique number can be used to carry out transactions that do not involve money — such as obtaining land records or birth, death and caste certificates.

Ajai Sawhney, president and CEO of the national e-governance plan, said: “We have notified the mobile governance framework that will allow citizens to avail of most of the services without visiting a government office.” The idea is to reduce the interface between citizens and public servants and thus to curb corruption. “The integrated payment gateway for mobile services has already been launched in Goa,” Sawhney said at a workshop this week.

The other facet of the e-governance platform involves the use of a person’s unique identification (UID/Aadhaar) number or national identity card to be issued by the union home ministry. This will be for moneyed transactions.

To start with, banks have been told to open no-frills accounts of mobile users across India. Account holders will be able to transfer money, even to a different bank, on the basis of an m-pin. To withdraw or deposit money, biometric authentication using the UID number will be required.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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