Extreme automation at work in the Government
The Aadhaar platform and the Passport Seva Service now has a proven track record of delivering sustainable automation at scale, which was also witnessed during the pandemic
The following looks like an achievement of a private sector company, and it’s nowhere near to our perception of what PSUs / Government organisations can achieve. However, It’s happening on the ground every single day and with a high amount of success rate. The capacity of 10 crore authentications / day with an SLA of an authentication per 2 seconds. The internal response here is 200 milliseconds. The overall response from the moment the citizen begins his biometric authentication process to the moment, the actual authentication is done is 2 seconds. This translates to 882 authentications per second. The tougher part is these authentications are not equally dispersed during the day but a majority of them are done between 10am to 5pm. “When compared to the next massive scale authentication, at a global level – Visa and Mastercard put together authenticates over 222 authentications per second!,” claims Davesh Singh, Assistant Director General, UIDAI, Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), Government of India.
The disbursals for MNREGA, PDS, Mid-day meal scheme, kerosene distribution, etc are automated through these authentications. You guessed it right, the Aadhaar platform has been able to gain such stratospheric heights of scalability.
This is not all. “The platform has the capacity to generate 18 lakh Aadhaar IDs per day. One hundred and twenty five crore Aadhaar IDs have already been generated. As far as the coverage is concerned, 99.99 percent of the 18+ age group has been covered by Aadhaar. Currently, over 5 lakh Aadhaars are being generated on a daily basis, because most of the population has been covered. This includes 1.5 lakh fresh Aadhaar IDs / day and 3.5 lakh people are making updations to their Aadhaar information – it can be a change in address, phone number, etc,” says Singh.
Even during the COVID-19 crisis, the Aadhaar platform proved to be a gamechanger in the right authentication of the citizens to be delivered the relief material, subsidies, food grains, etc. The same person doesn’t get the disbursal again has to be ensured.
The next extreme example of automation is about what has been achieved by the Passport Seva Kendra, especially during the COVID-19 crisis, as a part of the Vande Bharat Mission. India, according to estimates evacuated over 13.74 lakh Indians based abroad, probably the largest evacuation of its citizens by any country during the pandemic. “At this juncture, there was a demand spike for short validity passports, registration certificates, etc. This was done on a mass scale with very less target TAT to provision for the required paperwork to be completed. This couldnt have been possible without the digital platforms equipped with advanced automation capabilities backed by application modernisation and data centre enhancements,” says Golok Kumar Simli, Chief Technology Officer, Passport Seva Programme, Ministry of External Affairs, Govt of India.
The Government of NCT of Delhi provides over 600 services through the e-district portal and “automation can play an important role in making the Govt processes simpler and mapped to the various acts and laws, some of them age old and archaic but until they are abolished they have to be accommodate in the process,” says Santulan Chaubey, Director, Delhi e-Governance Society, Department of IT, Government of NCT of Delhi.
Automation will help the Government to serve not only the employees but also the citizens at large. “Automation will play an important role in providing citizen service at their doorstep,” says Rishikesh Patankar, COO, CSC E-Governance Services Ltd
The Workload scheduling technology is emerging as a prominent form of automation for e-commerce companies. “They have multiple systems and applications coupled with multiple automation platforms both at their end and partners. A common automation framework is required to ensure timely delivery of the orders. Enter Workload scheduling technology,” says Sunil Kumar Thakur, Country Director, BMC
Thakur also gave an example of how the workload automation solution can be used by the Government to deliver targeted subsidies at regular intervals. He also explained why it was a better approach than the conventional batch processing method.
Automation can be used during flood situations in identifying geographies with less or no mention of ‘I am Safe Message’ on Facebook. This unstructured data can be organised from various systems and put before the Govt official who can then direct the flood relief machinery in areas where it is required the most.
While automation has many advantages, it comes with various challenges like “lack of IT support at the field level in the far flung areas; online frauds and also the scarcity of skilled manpower in running the systems after implementation,” concludes Singh from UIDAI.
Vishwas Dass also contributed for this article
The article has been repurposed from the webinar conducted in partnership with BMC Software
