After ‘Mann Ki Baat’, Prime Minister Narendra Modi is all set to connect with the citizens through a ‘town hall’.
Modi is going to do a town hall on August 6, a first by an Indian Prime Minister. Town Hall, as a concept, is commonly used in the West among politicians as well as CEOs to interact with people directly.
In India, Town Halls are mostly done by the CEOs of companies.
So what will Modi’s town hall have? “It will have panel discussions and an exclusive ‘Live-talk’ between the Prime Minister and selected citizens from various locations,” a senior government official told
The Townhall will be part of the celebration of MyGov – government’s citizen engagement portal – which has just completed two years.
Among the audience of 20,000 there will be also a few Cabinet Ministers including Finance Minister Arun Jaitley and Minister of Information Technology Ravi Shankar Prasad.
“A meeting under the Chairmanship of Chief Executive Officer of MyGov Gaurav Dwivedi was convened at the IG Stadium on Saturday (July 30) to discuss the event and finalise the various arrangements for the event,” said another senior government official.
The event will see participation from various stakeholders including Cabinet ministers, senior officers from Ministries/ Departments, government organisations, representatives from media, IT and social media industry and citizens who have participated in the MyGov initiative, the official said.
Launched in 2014 by the Prime Minister, MyGov was a participatory governance initiative involving the common man.
The idea of this portal was to bring the government closer to the citizens by creating an interface for exchange of ideas and views to bring about socio economic transformation.
MyGov has 35.2 lakh registered members, 33.9 lakh comments in 589 discussion themes and around 1.82 lakh submissions in 489 tasks.
The discussions and tasks revolve around comments such as ‘make your city smart’, sharing thoughts about the Prime Minister’s ‘Mann Ki Baat’ on the radio and encouraging the use of LEDs, etc.