Shekhar Agrawal and Avinash Mathur of Vodafone gave an overview of Vodafone’s activities around different verticals. They put special emphasis on how their solutions are helping Asha worker in Gujarat for safe delivery of child. This has resulted in lowering of infant mortality rate by about 4%.
They also informed about the significant role that services such as m-pesa in financial inclusion. Participants from government departments and SeMT heads from states shared their experience with telecom service provider and explained their requirements.
Shekhar Agrawal also emphasised on the importance of capacity building and how mobile could be used as tool for reaching out to large sections of the population for making them digitally literate. Echoing the point raised by Agrwarl, Dr. Ashwini Kumar Sharma, Managing Director, National Institute of Electronics & Information Technology (NIELIT), Government of India informed about the initiatives taken by Government of India to address the challenge of capacity building and raising digital literacy in the country.
On the growing penetration of mobile phones, Ranjan Dwivedi, Director General of Police and Commandant General Home Guards, Government of Uttar Pradesh was of the view that mGovernance provides an opportunity to reach out to the people at all levels with the information they require and citizen centric services they needed. However, unavailability of the content in Indian languages seem to be a barrier, therefore telecom company such as Vodafone should focus on providing content in the language in which customer was comfortable with.