Technology has turned citizens into customers with high expectations. When they interact with government, citizens today require the same high quality of customer care they get from large tech-savvy companies. They want one-stop information kiosk: a single place on the Web where they can access a wide variety of information and their queries are responded promptly. They expect government employees to have at their fingertips all the information they need to solve constituents’ problems and answer their questions regardless of the interoperability issues involved. They need agencies to climb out of their IT silos, pulling together to tackle the serious issues that challenge our communities.
The Bihar Foundation approached HashPro Technologies to renovate its existing website. In addition to its objectives of Bonding, Branding and Business, the web site connects people of Bihar residing outside the State with the Government of Bihar, helping build lasting relationships around the world.
Until September 2008, officials at Bihar Foundation, an initiative by the government of Bihar to facilitate interaction between Non-Resident Biharis (NRBs) and the government, was under tremendous pressure to do more for citizens, and to do it better. The Foundation officials were left trying to accomplish more for NRBs with fewer resources. This posed a difficult challenge, of course. But for the Foundation officials, it also presented an opportunity to transform the way government delivers services.
To meet these growing expectations, HashPro worked with Foundation’s CEO Vivek Kumar Singh (IAS) and manager Satyajit Narayan Singh, to find, evaluate and deploy technologies that helped produce a leaner, more agile forum on the Web that exceeds its citizens’ expectations.
Several technologies that are used extensively in the private sector also offer the same kinds of advantages to governments. The Foundation site was built using open source applications such as WordPress (for CMS) thereby reducing the maintenance and upgradation cost upto 75%. HashPro led the development of a site which contained multi lingual capacity, as well as an in depth registration and member management system as a foundation for a community driven website.
Since then, the Foundation has added half-a-dozen Chapters across the country as well as abroad. It has opened five offices in all metros – Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai, Kolkata and Delhi. Its newly added Chapters in foreign countries are in the United States (West Coast), Dubai (UAE), Doha (Qatar), Sydney (Australia) and Seoul (South Korea).
Website: www.biharfoundation.in
