NDA@3: Twitter Seva gives e-governance big boost

NEW DELHI: Three years into its term, the Narendra Modi government has made its mark on social media.

A quick look at statistics shows that not only has PM Modi’s following gone up seven fold since 2014, but e-governance initiatives by various ministries have enabled many citizens to resolve problems by registering complaints through Twitter.

Leading the pack in terms of “resolved tickets”, or tweets that got a resolution from e-government handles, are the ministry of external affairs and the ministry of railways.

In fact, the Indian Railways handle processes around 7,000 tweets on a daily basis, says Twitter India.

The MEA raised more than 10,999 complaints since December 2016. The Union ministry of commerce and industry, which also uses a Twitter Seva, processed 750 cases in a month, of which 735 were solved using the hashtag #Mociseva.

The five ministers with the most followers on Twitter are Sushma Swaraj (8.04 million), Arun Jaitley (7.69 million), Smriti Irani (6.37 million), Rajnath Singh (5.55 million) and Suresh Prabhu (2.95 million). Twitter India head of policy Mahima Kaul said, “Many of the ministries have used their accounts for grievance redressal while others have engaged in feedback on policy issues.

Ultimately, the platform is what you make of it and the Indian government’s holistic use of Twitter is a pretty good example for citizen engagement.” The numbers are interesting.

According to Twitter, to ensure that a Seva platform is delivering real-time service, it has more than 7,500 handles across ministries for service delivery.

These handles collectively track close to 6-7 lakh citizen tweets per month, said Kaul. The effect is apparent.

According to statistics with Twitter, the word “India” has received increasing traction in the past three years.

From May 26, 2014 to May 25, 2015, the mention was 53 million, and then 67 million in the following year. Between May 26, 2016 and May 17, 2017, the mention of “India” has been tracked 74.4 million times.

The biggest impact is, of course, on the following of the PM, which is now at 30.1 million followers.

The mention of “Modi” too has seen an upward swing, from 12.2 million times between May 26, 2014 and May 25 to 19.7 million during May 26, 2016 to May 17, 2017.

The top five hashtags in the past three years have been #TransformingIndia, #MakeInIndia, #Mannkibaat, #Demonetisation and #Fakecases.

Interestingly, approximately 6.5 lakh tweets were recorded in 24 hours of the announcement of demonetisation. Some of the top tweets of Modi in the past year, show Twitter stats, are the ones from May 16, when he tweeted about his mother’s visit to RCR, a survey on demonetisation (Jan Jan Ki Baat) on November 16 and the Uri attack (September 16).