K'taka govt designing platform for citizen engagement

Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah today said the state government is designing a platform for citizen engagement 'iCare' through Mobile-One service which will help in ensuring good governance.
"Our Government has just begun designing a platform for citizen engagement iCare through Mobile-One, which is an interesting innovation in government," he said after inaugurating a two-day regional conference on 'Minimum Government and Maximum Governance' here.
Elaborating on such similar services, Siddaramaiah said recently the Tony Abbott government in Australia searched millions of posts on social media to enable it to come up with a better Immigration Policy.
He also said certain States in the US are experimenting with Open311, which is a form of technology allowing transparent and open communication using standardized protocols for location-based collaborative issue tracking.

Talking about Prime Minister Narendra Modi's call to state governments on mapping their department databases with Aadhaar (unique identification) for better targeting and removing all irregularities, he said Karnataka has become the first state, where this initiative, is speedily underway.
"Many of the departments are mapped with Aadhaar and duplicates are being removed, and service delivery tightened. This is an excellent example of Minimum Government and Maximum Governance," he said.
Several states are doing good work in the 'Ease of Doing Business' indicators and Karnataka is a preferred destination of Information Technology and other investments with over 35 per cent of India's IT exports coming from Bengaluru alone, Siddaramaiah said.

"We hope to do better and become the foremost state in these rankings as per World Bank's Doing Business indicators," he said.