UMANG: This app will let you access all govt services pan-India

The Narendra Modi government is all set to launch a master application, which is being hailed as 'Mother of all App'. The app, called UMANG (a short form for Unified Mobile Application for New-age Governance), will consolidate more than 200 services currently being offered by central, state and local administrations across the country.

The National e-Governance Division of the Department of  Electronics  and  Information  Technology has floated a proposal paper seeking to select a partner agency which would be responsible  for development, implementation, enhancement  and operation  and maintenance  UMANG, to make available all major central and state government services to the people without any hindrance.

The agency would be awarded the contract to implement UMANG platform initially for a three-year period, with a possibility of extension to another 2 years and again for 2 years, subject to mutually agreed terms and conditions.

The move, which is part of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Digital India programme, wants to create an app that will enable people to have access to pan-India e-Gov services from the central, state and local administration and their agencies as also private sector entities.

Some of the services which will be available under UMANG are, National scholarship, Healthcare applications, Passport Seva, women safety (Nirbhaya),  e-Post, crime and criminal tracking, network and systems, commercial tax/GST, income tax, CBSE/state education boards, e-municipality, IRCTC, utility bills, mother and child tracking, public distribution system, transport vahan/sarathi, e-court, m-kisan, land records, PF/NPS.

The government plans to have at least 50 service this year to start with and gradually scale up to 200 in three years.

The platform will be designed in such a way that it would be capable of maintaining or remembering citizen personal details, preferences and data required to access department services without the user having to re-enter every time.

Key identification documents like Aadhar Card, PayGov and DigiLocker shall also be included within this platform.

The government aims to make the app available to anyone using a smart phone and internet. There is also a proposal that all these services should be made available on SMS and a single toll-free number for those not having smart phone

In addition, it would facilitate convergence   of various efforts, carried out separately, to reach out to citizens through their mobile phones.

To access the UMANG app, citizens will have to download just a single application which will work on one short code on, GPRS/Internet, support for SMS and Toll Free for IVR will be additional features.

Objective of the UMANG App

• Act as an enabler and facilitator in developing overall mobile based service delivery  ecosystem in India;
• Provide  easy access  for  citizens  to  various  services  via  single  mobile  application,  easy to remember short code and single Toll-Free number:
• Provide  easy  discoverability  of  services,  easy  manageability  and  standardization  of service delivery;
• Provide for quick mobile enablement of e-Gov applications/services of government departments  through  easy  and  fast  integration,  on-boarding,  mobile  front-end  roll-out  by  bringing  their  services on  this  mobile  application  platform.  Provide  another  value  added  services  to  departments  via  a  common  platform  through  integration with   TSPs   and   payment   gateway. This will facilitate   easy   on-boarding   of Government departments. 
• Provide multi-lingual support covering official Indian languages, in addition to English. Also, provide support for voice interaction in local languages.

The app would be made available on Android, iOS and Windows will support 12 Indian languages including English.