India’s Telangana state to spend US$40 million to bring digital government to 13,000 villages

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Gone are the days of citizens being bounced back and forth across different government agencies.

From birth certificates to government schemes, over 20 million villagers in the state of Telangana in India can now conveniently submit requests and receive real-time updates from their mobile devices or at physical service centres within a stone’s throw from their homes.

The Government of Telangana is taking a whole-of-society approach with digital transformation, not just confining it within the government.

As connectivity forms the backbone of digital transformation, one of the state government’s first priorities was to first ensure internet connectivity for its 40 million strong population.

With about one-third of its population, estimated at 15 million people yet to be connected to the internet in Telangana, the state government recently initiated a US$40 million (S$52 million) project to connect 13,000 villages with last mile fiber infrastructure, says Government of Telangana’s IT Advisor, Sai Krishna, to GovInsider.

To date, the state has laid down close to 70,000 to 75,000 kilometers of fibre across these villages, and has a remaining 30,000 kilometers to complete, according to Krishna.

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Citizen-centric approach to digital government

With every citizen having access to basic internet connectivity, the state is now on track to deliver over 400 government services to their doorstep, be it between agencies or between the government and citizens.

To ensure that these services are accessible to citizens who may not be digitally-savvy or lack smartphones, the state government has put in place multiple channels, including SMS or USSD channels.

Close to 5,000 physical touchpoints located within villages were also put in place to guide or help citizens access digital government services.

Krishna underlined the importance of adopting an omnichannel platform to ensure that citizens interact with government services “flawlessly on a real time basis” across various digital channels.

Omnichannel experiences allow customers to experience seamless movement between channels and to have a choice in their preferred channel, a leader from The Boston Consulting Group (BGC) wrote previously.

The importance of physical touchpoints for digital government services was raised by India’s National e-Governance Division (NeGD)’s former President and CEO, Abhishek Singh, in a previous GovInsider interview.

A similar approach has also been taken by Bangladesh’s a2i, which has set up over 9,000 digital centres located within walking distance of every villager.

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Great cloud migration

About half of Telangana government IT systems are legacy systems, and the government has had a mammoth task to migrate its “decades-worth of infrastructure” to modern, cloud-based infrastructure to tap on innovative technologies.

Aside from tackling their own legacy systems, Krishna shares that the government is also tapping on the expertise of private cloud players, such as the ready-to-adopt applications from Amazon Web Services (AWS) stack, to deliver its digital government services.

“For our immediate needs, we look to modern infrastructure like AWS cloud services to deploy the applications seamlessly and securely for our 40 million citizens,” he explains.

Currently, the headquarters at the state, district and Mandal administrative levels are connected by point-to-point networks, which refer to closed, private links between two devices or endpoints.

Krishna shared that the state government is embarking on another project to upgrade their internal connectivity from point-to-point to the latest networks, including Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS), Software-Defined Wide Area Network (SD-WAN), and Secure access service edge (SASE).

Tapping on flexible yet secure options enable the state government to also bring onboard the services provided by local village councils, known as Panchayats. This allows the government to bundle the various services together around the citizens’ needs.

Accelerating AI and GenAI adoption

Krishna says that accelerating AI adoption is one of the key drivers for the government to phase out its legacy systems.

In September, the Telangana government announced a planned artificial intelligence

(AI) city that will be built on 200 acres near Hyderabad, the capital of Telangana.

The AI city will focus on developing next-generation AI technologies and solutions, host data centres as well as high-performance computing centres, and deliver on AI upskilling.

AI will be part of the Telangana government’s efforts to make the state a trillion-dollar economy in the near future, and a three trillion-dollar economy in the next one decade, said India’s Information Technology and Industry Minister, D. Sridhar Babu, as reported by ET CIO.

The same month also saw the government sign an agreement with one of India’s largest data centre operators, Yotta, to launch the country’s largest AI supercomputer of 25,000 high-performance GPUs.

The state will need a lot of GPUs to power generative AI (GenAI), says Krishna.

“We are working on almost 20 to 25 use cases to implement GenAI-based solutions in our stack to bring about better dashboards, analytics, and government-to-citizen services.”

Citing the example of call centres and government websites or apps, he shares that GenAI can be used to process basic requests, before directing citizens to officers based on the different types of grievances they may have.

These use cases will be first tested as proof of concepts (POCs), and scaled up if they can prove their value.

LLMs optimising digital twins

Krishna also highlights the potential of large language models (LLMs) to optimise digital twins for smart cities and deliver personalised and contextually relevant information to users.

“On a real-time basis, you can bring in all the data to a single dashboard, and use the LLMs to find out the right decision to plan your city in terms of water, gas, utilities and traffic management,” he explains.

Coupled with other emerging technologies like blockchain and Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications, they can all be integrated in a command control centre to enhance productivity and citizen service delivery.

Back in 2022, Hyderabad built the largest police command and control centre in India to not only deal with policing, but also emergencies and disasters.

Finally, Krishna underlines the importance of public-private partnerships to accelerate such innovations to use in the government.
 

“In order to achieve speed and scale, we definitely rely upon our private players to deploy these applications,” he says.