eGov Foundation partners with Reap Benefit and Asian Century Foundation: Building citizen centric solutions for urban issues
Jul 13, 2021
Mumbai (Maharashtra) [India], July 13 (ANI/Connect360 PR): eGov Foundation has signed 2 MOUs with Reap Benefit and Asian Century Foundation to boost citizen involvement on urban civil issues and to promote expertise transfer from experts in Asian countries on key development issues in cities across India.
These associations drive crucial understanding of local civic issues and enable citizen centric solutions.
Speaking on the occasion, Viraj Tyagi, CEO of eGov Foundation said, "Our aim is to ensure that every citizen in every city of India is able to access the services they need from their local governments with ease and transparency. Through these associations, eGov works to create avenues for collaboration and knowledge sharing among academia (scholars, practitioners, and policymakers), while encouraging people-to-people exchange in India. Our focus and priority are on areas of socio-economic development as well as expansion of access to local governments for citizens."
eGov Foundation has partnered with Reap Benefit to increase young citizen participation in local civic issues and to expand access to local governments for the people. eGov and Reap Benefit have integrated their solutions, in order to widen the reach of citizen services on the DIGIT platform through the Solve Ninja Chatbot and to augment the engagement of citizens with ULBs using technology tools.
The first phase of this partnership will involve the provision of the Public Grievance Redressal (PGR) service to the citizens through the Solve Ninja WhatsApp chatbot in three Urban Local Bodies (ULBs) of Punjab, which will be further scaled to other ULBs after six months.
Kuldeep Dantewadia, Co-Founder and CEO, Reap Benefit Foundation, explained, "eGov Foundation and Reap Benefit share a strong belief in Societal Platform thinking to create real and sustainable social change at scale. Our mission of creating a civic muscle in our country's youth compliments eGov's scale at speed approach of transforming governance in all cities across India. We started discussions with the eGov team six months ago which quickly transpired into an action plan. The two teams designed a technology integration of Public Grievance Redressal (PGR) with the Solve Ninja WhatsApp chatbot which will be piloted in 3 cities of Punjab."
"While we begin with a few cities in Punjab, we are committed to scale our partnership across Punjab and many other states. We are also excited by the prospects that this partnership opens up to create a nation-wide citizen inclusion and engagement movement," he further added.
This partnership has been set up to build capacity and facilitate knowledge transfer and learning from experts in East and Southeast Asian countries on key development issues in urban India.
K.R. Subramanian, CEO, ACF, said, "ACF has been engaged with the urban space through its research and other programs, specifically through the lens of importing best practices, models and creating platforms for experts to engage with each other across borders. We are working with eGov to build inclusive and resilient cities. Our partnership is focused on identifying key factors that enable cities to develop into economic units that are liveable and sustainable. This work will be done through various activities such as fellowship programmes, research, workshops, dialogues and the building of a virtual East Asia hub within eGov."
"The ultimate objective of the interchange is to promote granular and focused development-sector collaboration across India, China and South-East Asia, and to develop comprehensive regional perspectives and bodies of knowledge," he further added.
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