The Finer Features of the Government’s PR Website MyGov.in

Among the website’s interesting features is the ‘New India Championship’, an interactive and gamified experience.

Last month, while preparing for a lecture I was to deliver, I went to mygov.in to get some information I needed. From there, I learnt about threeyears.mygov.in, a microsite that aims to serve as a repository of information related to the NDA government’s initiatives and their results in the last three years. Although this website is a part of the government’s PR outreach, it did have some useful features, which came as a pleasant surprise.

The information available on the site can be categorised into two sub-sections:

- Information about initiatives like Digital India and special initiatives undertaken for women, like the ‘Ujjwala Yojana’ (related to LPG connections) and ‘Beti Bachao Beti Padhao’

- And the aforementioned PR outreach about providing a corruption-free government, oriented towards helping the underprivileged.

For the purpose of this article, I am focusing on the information part.

An interesting feature of the site is an animated character, ‘Prerna’, that takes one through each section of the website from the homepage. There are a lot of interactive videos and infographics under each narrative. The ‘Voice of India’ section carries curated stories of beneficiaries of different schemes of the government through testimonial videos.

The ‘Quiz Whiz’ section carries a quiz on governance, similar to the one last year. A separate section named ‘The Modi Festival’ has information of events planned across the country by the Ministry of Information & Broadcasting, to disseminate the achievements of the government in the last three years. The ‘Media Zone’ section is fairly exhaustive and I found a few infographics, flyers and other downloadable materials that were useful for my lecture.

A new initiative I saw this year was the ‘New India Championship’.

This is an interactive experience using gamification, that allows visitors to participate in government initiatives through simple activities like sharing social media information and referring to the ‘BHIM’ app. Some of the more complex tasks involve participating in ‘Swachh Bharat’ and blogging.

There is a point-based system for this championship that closes on 26 July 2017. Interestingly, I was told that the activities covered under this championship were based on ideas shared by Prime Minister Narendra Modi during his popular ‘Mann ki Baat’ radio show. The winners of the contest stand a chance to be invited to an exclusive meeting with the PM at the Town Hall.

A lot of people will find the BHIM app-related contests very lucrative. Every participant will gain points by referring the app to his/her friends once the referred person(s) start making transactions through the app. This is in addition to the referral bonus and cash-back given at the time of referral.

I was also very excited to see crowdsourcing for the translation of over a 100 government websites in 12 Indian languages. Each approved translation gives points to the participant. For a country with high language diversity like India, this attempt to take help from multilingual citizens to reach other citizens in the language they are most comfortable in is laudable.

Here are a few suggestions to make this site more useful.

• There should be a citizen’s section focusing on daily issues related to law and order, red-tapism and corruption in government offices.
• Also if the feedback from the social media platforms is anything to go by then a section dedicated to discussing education policies and taking citizen’s feedback on the same should be added.

(The writer is an investment professional, author and stand-up comedian. He can be reached @freentglty. This is a personal blog and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)