Civil servants face many challenges in the exercise of their duties such as fragmentation of data, inadequate funds, growing complexity of the needs of citizens, ageing population, increasing vulnerability due to climate change, etc. In this context, maintaining adequate levels of efficiency and bringing transformation in the lives of people are becoming more difficult day-by-day.
In this context, emerging technologies and automation can enable the government to provide outstanding levels of customer experience, driven by innovations. It can be utilised by the civil servants in ensuring efficient public service delivery and affecting change in India in the following ways:

• Quick and effective service delivery: Various processes can be streamlined through digital platforms and portals. For example, online portals for various government services such as passport applications, tax payments, and land records can reduce the time and effort required to complete these tasks.
• Efficient allocation of resources: Data analytics and ICT tools will help integrate the operations, such as those relating to the PDS of the Food Corporation of India, Central Warehousing Corporation, food grain transportation of railways and roads and others, thus helping improve the supply chain networks and reducing wastage.
• Transparency and accountability: It can help uncover evidence of corruption, waste, bias, and discrimination. For example, blockchain can be used to track the distribution of government benefits and subsidies, ensuring that they reach the intended beneficiaries.
• Simultaneous skill upgradation: Digital courses can prove to be a great tool to enable civil servants’ continuous learning without taking a break from their duties, as it provides time and location flexibility. Also, Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) can be used to provide immersive training simulations for police officers, firefighters, and other emergency responders.
• Responsive administration: Emerging technologies can be used to automate routine tasks. For example, Al-powered chatbots can be used to provide citizens with quick and accurate responses to their queries.
• Smart mobility and healthcare: Al-enabled smart traffic management applications are significantly reducing wait times, energy use, and emissions. In the healthcare sector, IoT devices can be used to monitor patient health remotely, reducing the need for hospital visits and improving patient outcomes.
• Citizen engagement: Real time monitoring can be done with the help of online social audit using M-governance (mobile governance) where people can share their updates of the execution of the programmes directly.

Civil servants can use these technologies to automate routine tasks, process large volumes of data, and improve citizen engagement, thereby making governance more efficient and transparent. Utilising technology to enhance the quality of public service delivery would help in increasing the trust of the citizens in the system.