In order to engage the youth of the country in the nation’s development, the Government on 26th July 2014 launched a portal where citizens can discuss and share thoughts, empowering the people to contribute towards good governance through various tasks and discussions. Launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the portal — MyGov — will be a platform that empowers the citizen to contribute towards Surajya. “The platform would bridge the gulf between people and Government. Democracy cannot succeed without people’s participation in Government and this participation should not be limited only during elections. The participation should be there in fulfilling peoples’ aspirations and needs,” Modi said. MyGov presents an opportunity to citizens to both ‘discuss’ and ‘do.’ There are multiple theme-based discussions on MyGov where a range of people would share their thoughts and ideas, the Ministry of Communications and IT said in a statement. Further, any idea shared by a contributor will also be discussed on these discussion forums, allowing constructive feedback and interaction. Citizens can upload documents, case studies, pictures, videos, and other work plans on the platform. The collaboration platform would not just facilitate sharing of ideas and views, but also derive actionable insights for specific governance challenges and issues. This would be called the ‘Discuss’ platform on the mygov.in platform. It said groups and corners were an important part of MyGov. The platform has also been divided into various groups — Clean Ganga, Girl Child Education, Clean India, Skilled India, Digital India and Job Creation. “Each group consists of online and on ground tasks that can be taken up the contributors. The objective of each group is to bring about a qualitative change in that sphere through people’s participation,” the Communications Ministry said. Those who wished to go beyond discussions and contribute on the ground, MyGov would offer several avenues to do so. Citizens can volunteer for various tasks and submit their entries, which would then be reviewed by other members and experts. “Once approved, these tasks can be shared by those who completed the task and by other members on MyGov. Every approved task would earn credit points for completing the task,” it said. National Informatics Centre (NIC) and the Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY) would implement and manage the platform (MyGov). http://mygov.in/ http://mygov.nic.in/