News: Recently, Meri Panchayat App wins WSIS Champion Award 2025 for Excellence in Digital Governance held in Geneva, Switzerland.
About “Meri Panchayat” mobile application
- The “Meri Panchayat” mobile application is a transformative digital governance initiative launched by the Ministry of Panchayati Raj (MoPR) in collaboration with the National Informatics Centre (NIC).
- Aim: To promote transparency, citizen participation, and efficient service delivery at the grassroots level by leveraging digital technology.
- The Meri Panchayat app has been honored with the WSIS Prizes 2025 Champion Award under the Action Line Category for Cultural Diversity and Identity, Linguistic Diversity, and Local Content.
- The application directly benefits over 25 lakh elected representatives and approximately 950 million rural citizens across 2.65 lakh Gram Panchayats in India.
- It is designed to empower grassroots governance and bridge the information divide in rural areas.
Key Features
- The app provides real-time access to critical information such as panchayat budgets, receipts, and payments, along with details of elected representatives, public infrastructure, and available civic services.
- It also offers access to Gram Panchayat Development Plans (GPDPs), enabling citizens and representatives to monitor development projects and their status.
- Users can track projects, view timelines, and assess fund utilization efficiently.
- Citizens can actively participate in governance by proposing new projects, reviewing and rating completed works, and accessing Gram Sabha agendas and decisions, fostering accountability and participatory democracy.
- The app includes a grievance redressal mechanism that allows users to submit complaints and feedback.
- These features are geo-tagged and geo-fenced to ensure location-specific transparency and responsiveness.
- It supports over 12 Indian languages, making it accessible to diverse linguistic communities across the country.
- Its multilingual interface promotes cultural inclusion and ensures that rural citizens from various regions can use the app with ease.
- The application also provides weather forecasts at the Gram Panchayat level, which is especially useful for farmers and rural planning.
- It also includes social audit tools, enabling citizens to evaluate the functioning of panchayats and hold them accountable. It ensures transparency in fund allocation and usage, contributing to good governance.
