Technology is a great enabler in making people’s lives easy and the government is playing a big role in this. Highlighting the importance and use of technology, Akhilesh Srivastava, World Economic Forum India Liaison Office, spoke at the Elets India Transformation Summit.
Akhilesh Srivastava, World Economic Forum India Liaison Office, is the man behind the FASTag, which the whole India is using. “Itis saving time, energy and fuel,” he said. “The amount of fuel which is being saved because of FASTag is something around 25,000 crore in a year, apart from the increase in the revenue,” he added. “Last year, the total collection was around Rs 38,500 crore, which was almost negligible compared to the previous year,” he further said.
Srivastava said that the primary motto of the government is to give the best delivery to the citizens. “I’m very happy that the Uttarakhand state government is taking many steps to do it,” he said. “One of the schemes which was launched a few months back by the chief minister was ‘Apuni Sarkar’ – where the alerts are going to the citizens, they can download the things, and get the services into their Digilocker. So this is fantastic,” he added
Technology is the best enabler, Srivastava said. “I implemented the data lake model of FASTag in NHAI and this data lake in NHAI, in spite of COVID, when majority of infrastructure companies were struggling to survive or retain their operational efficiency, NHAI broke its own record and and constructed 50 per cent more than the normal years – 4500 kilometres of road which used to be around 2800-3000 kms every year,” he said.
Srivastava said that he is trying another technology through the World Economic Forum in road safety and has to submit a report to the Niti Aayog advisories. Road accidents are one of the biggest killers in India. More people die in India because of accidents rather than any other disease. “The normal road safety measures were not yielding the results, so the World Economic Forum, on the request of Government of India, tried to bring a next-gen solution – Road Safety 2.2 – where technology is being imbibed into the various lifecycle of road accidents,” he said. “Through this, we came to know that 80 per cent of the accidents take place because of the driver’s behaviour. Overspeeding is the biggest killer,” he added.
“So we tried to use IoT and Artificial Intelligence-based applications. Low cost applications like mobile app, sensors reduced the accidents drastically. In one of the pilots, it was 98 per cent. The drivers drove around 2.5 crore kilometres in six months, without any single accident,” Srivastava further said.
Srivastava congratulated the Uttarakhand government for taking a wonderful initiative in automating, transforming and taking the state to the next level in terms of technology. “I’m sure in years to come, we will see a drastic transformation in Uttarakhand and people’s delivery services by use of the technology,” he concluded.