Tech That Has Impacted The Common Indian

UID/ Aadhar: The identification card through biometric authentication hopes to uniquely identify every citizen of India. The Aadhar (UID) scheme has successfully scanned 10 crore Indians till date.

The Cellphone: Mobile penetration in India has been of the most gut crunching numbers ever registered. As per TRAI records, there are 800 million+ registered mobile subscribers in India out of which 600 million+ are active. Be it the humble sub Rs. 1,000 handsets or the modern day smartphones with features like calling, texting, money transactions, email on the go, app stores etc, the mobile phone has been a big boon and made a lasting impact on lives of poor & rich alike.
PRS-Indian Railways passenger Reservation System: PRS made ticket booking hassle-free for millions of train travellers in India. The pre-PRS days saw long queues, and a lot of time wastage through wasteful manual processes. PRS was an intranet system that enabeled the ticket booking counters to computerise and work in an efficient and non-ambigous manner.

Aidmatrix foundation corporate disaster resource network: An Online portal that connects public, Government agencies, corporates, and voluntary organizations and suppliers to react quickly to disaster and indulge in post disaster relief and rebuilding process. More than 5000 product suppliers and corporates have registered on CDRN system to offer their services & donations for relief agencies. The CDRN has been instrumental in providing a helping hand to relief operations in Leh Flash floods (Aug 2010), Punjab Floods (July 2010), etc.

Ministry of agriculture, Govt. of India RealCraft: A nationwide project that has registered 3L+ fishing vessels across the Indian coastal areas. The project is operating out of 164 locations with 2000 trained officials handling registrations to help coastal security agencies in uniquely identifying and monitoring the fishing vessels in the sea.

Rajasthan BPL Pension Dissemination: A system that lets Pensioners get to know, in around a days' time, the status of the dispatch of their pension amount and by when should they expect that money to reach them.

NREGA: NREGA is an employment guarantee scheme which has benefited the rural population by guaranteeing hundred days of unskilled wage labour in a financial year to members of each rural household. 12 crore job cards have been issued to the poor and needy. However, as per a recent note circulated to all state departments by the rural development ministry, only 10 % of the people under the scheme were classified as poor in 2010-2011.

E-Shakti: Implemented by the Govt. of Bihar for successful roll out of NREGA scheme in the state through a highly automated attendance capture and wage dispersal system for BPL families. 7lakh+cards have been distributed across Patna and this number is to go up to 40 Lakh over 4 districts soon. The TAT between the work done and the wage received has been significantly brought down from 6-7 weeks to 5 days.

Core Banking System: Nationalised banks deployed the interconnected system of banking management known as Core banking system. Many benefits including ATM banking, internet banking, Mobile banking, reduction in queues in the bank premises etc have been achieved as a result of the Core banking procedure. ICICI bank continues to be at the forefront of technology and has been found pushing the boundaries for the other banks.

Government of Chhattisgarh: Computerization of Paddy Procurement and Public Distribution System: The entire system to track procurement and distribution has been centralized, with built in alerts, checks and balances to ensure that all processes are being followed. Govt of chattisgarh was able to derive many benefits from this system including paddy procurement from farmers, its storage, milling and finally the distribution of rice and other commodities to 37 Lakh ration card holders through Fair Price Shops. This has brought a lot of transparency in the system.

FOIS: FOIS (Freight Operations Information System) is an innovative solution from CRIS that solves the age old puzzle the Indian Railways had about automating and streamlining the processes in an operation that had no schedule. Using FOIS, the Railways have been able to reduce the turn around time for freight wagons from 8 days to about 5.5 days.

139 Rail sampark:139 is the national Railway enquiry number which can be dialled from any landline or phone without prefixing the STD code to obtain updated information on arrival/ departure of trains, PNR reservation of berth status and fare enquiry.

Indian Railways Online passenger Reservation System: IRCTC has made ticket booking hassle-free for millions of train travellers in India by providing the option of online ticket booking. This has also helped curbed corruption through agents. Every day, around 3 lakh passengers use the portal to book tickets for themselves who earlier had to wait in endless queues.

ACES: Automation of Central Excise and Service Tax (ACES) is a Mission Mode project (MMP) under the e-Governance plan of the Govt of India for Central Board of Excise and Customs to automate all major processes in Central Excise and Service Tax through a workflow-based application.

Branchless banking: In many underdeveloped countries it is a common phenomenon that a person would have a mobile phone but no bank account, to cater to this considerable group which is around a billion in number and ever increasing, companies are trying to provide banking facilities using mobile phones.One such implementation of the same is SimpliBank which is a core banking system, which provides the entire banking solution in the cloud, and works on a universal interface that will even work on ultra-low cost, pre-paid mobiles, allowing customers to withdraw, deposit, and do money remittances safely, instantly, and conveniently. The company has 50,000 customers ever since it started the service.

INCOIS: Tsunami early warning system- This support system is meant to monitor the seismic activity in Indian ocean, detect tsunamis, their travel time and then alert areas under direct impact of the impending threat. It does so by sending tsunami alerts to MHA, MoES, administrators and the general public, thereby helping reduce the damage to life and property. Accurate warning under 10 minutes to the time of the Tsunami is targeted at nearly 400 million people living along coastal India.

e-Seva: Government of Andhra Pradesh seeks to redefine citizen services through eSeva, using state-of-the-art technologies. The Government of Andhra Pradesh has a clear vision to create a knowledge society by using Information Technology in all aspects of development and governance. Pioneering efforts are being made to reach the benefits of IT to the citizens -and rural, rich and poor, literate and illiterate.

NIC Seednet: NIC's Seednet is an online portal which provides facts on availability, supply and demand regarding seeds to farmers. It also gives details about field standards, minimum seed certification standards and many other standards associated with seeds to help in increasing productivity.

Integrated Information System for Foodgrains Management: IISFM is an MIS solution implemented by the NIC for the FCI which helped in the tracking of national food stocks kept at widely dispersed FCI godowns.

E-Choupal: A sub project of the project symphony, e-Chaupal combines a Web portal in the local language and PCs with Internet access placed in the villages to create a two-way channel between ITC and the villagers. Launched in June 2000, 'e-Choupal', has already become the largest initiative among all Internet-based interventions in rural India. which has reached out to over 4 million farmers.

E-filing of Income Tax: The IT department introduced the system of E —filling of returns on its website. This has helped eradicate huge paper wastages, delays in filling and in some cases complete avoidance of return filling due to complexity involved.