Automatic Transcript:
Andhra Pradesh is one of the largest states in the country, and it’s in the south of India. We have a population of 19 million and that’s only three districts and Hyderabad is the capital of the state. The entire state is divided into districts and then individual districts are divided into Mandel’s and all put together. We have eleven hundred territorial units in our state. We had a culture of videoconference earlier as well. We had the video conferencing from the state to the district level. But the whole idea was to go deeper down, go down to the mountains and connect these 11 hundred units to the state level and in turn, a lot of districts to interact with the with the Mandel’s, as well as various departments to interact in their own groups with their own field functionaries. And in the long run, provide a facility for the citizens to come and air their grievances and provide feedback to the government directly from the respective Mandal points.
The technological services are deputy is basically separation of the government wholly owned by the state government. It was created when we were starting, you know, doing the computation of the different departments. There is a generation gap between the old video system and the new video system that basically say total generation gap. First of all, the quality of video conferencing was not. The quality of the video was not very good. So it can be a very big limitation was simultaneous video conferencing because it was not possible. You want to go to something which is on the cutting edge of technology, something which is futuristic. We did not want to go with something, you know, which is already existing and, you know, meeting the already trodden path.
What we want to do the best in a country like India, bandwidth is always a big challenge. In India, we have a lot of challenges in reaching to the levels of Mandel’s with proper bandwidth that is required for videoconferencing. So video is best suited for that because video can sustain a high packet loss of up to 20 percent, which makes it highly suitable to reach up to the Mandal level. So when the Mandal officer is joining the conference using his, let’s say, for example, a tablet from a village, he still is able to get a good quality conferencing with the state official here in Hyderabad. The major advantages of video over any other technology is, as we talked about. One is the scalability, which when you go up to when 11 hundred models, it is able to seamlessly integrate and get all of them on board into the same video call very easily. The distributed architecture of video is another big advantage we had in the state because, as we said, there are twenty three districts in the state and we had deployed a video router at each of the districts to ensure that the bandwidth stays local to the district when the district officials are talking to the collector. The bandwidth remains local to the district. The scope of the project is expanding to include more and more desktops and mobile devices connectivity.
It’s an age of instant communication. You need to communicate your thoughts to the to the government functionaries at the fee level. At the same time, get get their thoughts back into the into the process so that the policy making process is democratic. Policy making processes participative in the long run. We we expect this to go down to the villages, and once that happens, we should be in a position to create telepresence for four villages so that they can connect directly with the state and they can not just air their grievances, but provide the constructive feedback to the government.