AskSarkar – Pakki Jankari Powered by CoRover Among the Winners of Aatma Nirbhar App Innovation Challenge

Bengaluru, Karnataka, India | 12^th August 2020: The ‘AatmaNirbhar Bharat App Innovation Challenge’ supported by the Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY)’s Niti Aayog along with the Atal Innovation Mission, which was launched on July 4 saw participation from more than 6,940 tech entrepreneurs and startups across the country, and saw 24 winners in nine categories. In others category, MapMyIndia, Ask Sarkar and MyITreturn are the top 3 winners.
 
Years ago, it took days to get hands on essential government documents. A person would call someone who could send them to requested documents, hope they would follow through and then wait for the postal service to do its job. When they did not arrive in a week or so, the process is repeated.
 
These days, government websites are relied upon for information about the Government Schemes, Policies, Benefits, Scholarships, Jobs, reports, budgets and more that central, state and local governments post on their websites.
 
When citizens make contact with their governments, whether to seek services or information, their experience is often frustrating. While a small minority of citizens may find that their government offers the requested services or information in a timely and helpful manner, the vast majority do not. The constituent experience, when interacting with their government, can shape their assessment of, attitude toward, and trust in government.
 
The purpose of government posting any update on online channels is for the citizens will be able to locate and find information. The current experience, on the other hand, often leave users more frustrated than grateful. Many of us feel that this promised land of facts is more of a mirage than an informational oasis. Such behaviour is not limited to the one branch. This problem is pervasive across all arms of the government, including the executive, legislature, judiciary and spans every hierarchy – from central to the state to the district to the town to the village levels.
 
Particularly annoying are prominent websites that promise to link users to valuable data, but lead to sites with very little information. Sometimes the data and reports available online are five to ten years old. Spot check of the data in AskSarkar shows that more recent reports exist, but these are hidden in meaningless layers of website organisation.
 
Search engines and social media don’t even claim they provide authenticated information from the official sources. But, AskSarkar does!
 
In other cases, the links are broken. A lot of government websites report -“not found” message. Thankfully Search Engines sometimes do a better job of revealing such information than the government sites. One of the issues with any search indexer like Google tends to be, they favour sites, that are optimised for their business. There is a private cottage industry built around servicing citizens; such companies game the results in their favour. This behaviour further frustrates the citizens who are looking for authentic government data, and they are taken for a ride in a private entity site, with a commercial agenda. This misaligned incentive results, user feeling that government not caring for them. Say, if one searches for PAN card, they may not get the authentic/official website of PAN, and would get the search result of an agent or private company. Similarly, for scholarship, there is scholarship portal from Government of India, which would not be the top result when someone searches for Scholarships.
 
Here is where AskSarkar (https://asksarkar.com) comes in. AskSarkar wants to give authentic information to the users, that takes away the pain of searching and testing the navigation skills of the citizens of India. AskSarkar helps collate and index the most popular questions that the citizens of India to ask when they look at central government websites. CoRover has simplified the access to all these sites by proving a simple interface to ask such questions. All people can now ask questions using their natural conversations. AskSarkar using AI, ML & NLP recognises the intent of what users ask and gives the relevant and authenticated information that will not frustrate you. This App supports 12+ Indian/Vernacular languages in both text, audio and video.
 
Founder and CEO of CoRover says, “The content and accuracy of AskSarkar will keep improving as the usage further increases. This is still a baby bot, which can grow and learn better with the questions users raise. So, ask more to make it better.”
 
Co-Founders, Manav Gandotra and Kunal Bhakhri, and CoRover’s Investor and Advisor, Mr. R. P. Singh have congratulated the entire CoRover team to make such an innovative and valuable app for Bharat, which will soon be used by the global audience.