Lok Sabha Treads Tech Path

The Lower House of the Parliament – Lok Sabha – has tied up with enterprise mobile messaging services provider ValueFirst for staying in touch with its members.

“The Lok Sabha Secretariat would use the messaging services to communicate with internal stakeholders and public alike with critical information directly, using this service. The system would enable them to send messages to multiple mobile phones covering all service providers in India,” said Vijay Shukla, country head and co-founder, ValueFirst.

All communication to the media would also be sent through this system. The messages through the system would be delivered and received in real time, he added.

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“The Lok Sabha needed a unique solution to fulfil its communication and connectivity needs keeping in mind the members of the house and their limitation of having regular meetings with each other. Parliament of India was also looking for a solution to bridge the gap of communication during ’no session period’ between the members of both houses and the Parliament itself. Another concern was to find an optimum solution for various routine communications flowing from the Secretariat to Members and Secretariat to general public,” added Shukla.

The political parties in the country and abroad had earlier experimented by sending SMSs to voters to garner votes. Recently, the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) had used such services for internal party-members’ communication needs.

Use of SMS in politics made headlines with US presidential hopeful Barack Obama sending 2.9 million text messages to announce the selection of US Senator Joseph Biden as Vice-Presidential running-mate, according to the mobile arm of the Nielsen media ratings company. (PTI)