‘Intelligent nations’ have to be more intelligent than technology’ : Mugdha Sinha

Mugdha Sinha, Secretary, Food, Civil Supplie

Mugdha Sinha, Secretary, Food, Civil Supplies & Consumer Affairs Department, Government of Rajasthan, threw light how we needed to use technology and data wisely for better growth, as she spoke at the recently held 9th Knowledge Exchange Summit in Goa, in May 2019.

AI, IoT, Blockchain have become integral part of working of the public and private sectors. Considering that leveraging IT and technology, for better working and growth, has become equally important.

Mugdha Sinha, Secretary, Food, Civil Supplies & Consumer Affairs Department, Government of Rajasthan, threw light on the same, as she spoke at the recently held 9th Knowledge Exchange Summit in Goa, in May 2019.

She said that since IT and data was driving lot of our policy making architecture, using data analytics wisely was very important. She said ‘intelligent nations’ depended upon how they had to be more intelligent than technology to be able to leverage technology for the benefit of the umpteen numbers of people.

“Today I am sorry to say we are using data analytics to only generate MIS kind of reports and we are not using the inherent technology of data analytics which is to predict and extrapolate data to be able to then use those recommendations for building policy making architecture,” she said.

“If I were to define in one word what is the requirement today for the government and the private sector to interact and leverage IT, I would say we need to focus consistently, for over a very long period, on one word which is called convergence. And this convergence has to be across departments, and also vertically across various technologies and also with the private sector,” she added.

Mugdha further added, “If you look at technology, the pace of technological changes is happening in a revolutionary manner. 4 years back, everybody was gung ho about 3D printing. Then there was IoT, IE and today everybody is talking about blockchain. Since technology is changing at a very fast pace, we need to understand that we can’t keep moving from one jargon to the other, without consolidating what we have done in the past.”

Meahwhile, Mugdha also emphasized on the human interface adding that technology should not replace it completely.  “So technology while it is a very good tool, and it is helpful because in a way we will be able to bring down corruption, increase access of people and also makes the whole system responsive. But the fact is that we must never forget that some amount of human interface is required in the system. Like when a person comes to you and he is disabled, when he writes to you anonymously he doesn’t write all those things. But when he comes to you in person and when you see that he is not just old but also disabled there is certain kind of urgency that happens and instead of just writing something on paper saying we will do it in 15 days, you goddamn pick up the phone and say… Listen Mr. DSO, you please do his work within the next 48 hours and report back to me…”

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