Innovate, inspire, and impact: Fulfilling the aspirations of a billion people at the India Public Sector Summit

At the first Amazon Web Services (AWS) Public Sector Summit in New Delhi, India more than 1,000 technologists gathered to learn about digital transformation through cloud technologies, get inspired, dive deep, and begin to build. AWS customers highlighted the groundbreaking work done in India through technology to improve the lives of the more than one billion Indian citizens.

Attendees learned how Indian government agencies are embracing new digital capabilities to seamlessly deliver citizen services, connect people in new ways, and unlock innovative digital experiences.

Read more for some highlights from the AWS Public Sector Summit New Delhi.

Simplifying the delivery of citizen services in rural India

Rishikesh Patankar, Vice President, Common Service Centres (CSC) E-Governance Services India Limited, and Chief Operating Officer, CSC Academy

Rishikesh Patankar, Vice President, Common Service Centres (CSC) E-Governance Services India Limited, and Chief Operating Officer, CSC Academy, highlighted how they are simplifying the delivery of citizen services in rural India through AWS.

CSCs act as access points to digital government services. By bringing these services to rural and remote locations, CSCs help make India a more digitally and financially inclusive society. CSC required a scalable, cost-effective solution, and needed to reduce response times and increase reliability. To achieve this, CSC turned to AWS for a solution that brings together AWS content delivery, storage, management, and high-availability services to improve the delivery of citizen services in rural India.

“We have been able to simplify the delivery of citizen-centric services by using AWS and the breadth of advanced cloud services like Amazon CloudFront, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), and many more. We have benefited from their massive economies of scale, pace of innovation, global security certifications, and agility in a pay-as-you-go model without requiring complex licenses,” said Rishikesh Patankar.

CSC is now prepared to quickly deliver these vital services to a greater number of people, and paved the way for innovation by giving people in remote areas access to new technology.

A new vision for the data-driven city in India

Shri Rahul Kapoor, Director of Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA), Government of India, shared how technology is enabling India to break new ground and do things that were previously not possible. The advances in and access to technology allows innovators to dream bigger and build more.

MoHUA launched its Smart Cities Mission (SCM) with the focus to develop data culture in 100 smart cities in India. As part of its plan, they launched the India Urban Observatory, a central platform that plugs into a variety of sources, and analyses both real-time and archival data to deliver actionable insights for the cities.

He highlighted the key initiative India Urban Observatory (IOU), on AWS, which enabled MoHUA to launch quickly – moving from idea to execution in just five weeks, while giving it the flexibility to scale from 500 datasets to 500,000.

Through IOU, MoHUA can collect and analyse data from many sources to get more accurate insights across cities and improve governance and public services, which are used to develop new best practices, future strategies, and new policy frameworks.

Educating the workforce of the future

Organisations in India are building digital and personalised learning experiences to educate the workforce of the future. This future generation will drive India’s progress and ensure the nation is competitive with other countries around the world.

Vandana Bhatnagar, Chief Program Officer, National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC), India, discussed how NSDC is building India’s skilling backbone through AWS technology. The NSDC is a not-for-profit set up by the Ministry of Finance to promote the development of skills among Indian students through the creation of large vocational institutions. To date, the NSDC has trained more than 5.2 million students.

NSDC needed a scalable, agile cost-effective technology platform for catering to the skilling and re-skilling needs of more than 400 million people in India. NSDC turned to AWS to run applications for their Skill India Portal Learning Management System (LMS), Skill Management and Accreditation of Training Centers (SMART), Takshashila Portal for Training of Trainers/Assessors as well as its enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. They can now handle high transaction volumes on their applications and manage their internal systems in a cost-effective manner.

Learn more about AWS in India

Learn more about AWS Public Sector and our global infrastructure of AWS Regions and Availability Zones to see what offerings are available. Contact us to explore any of the subjects covered in this blog, or answer other questions that could help realize a vision that greater benefits Indian citizens and society.