Meri Panchayat App Won WSIS Champion Award 2025

The Meri Panchayat app has been awarded the WSIS Prizes 2025 Champion Award under the Cultural and Linguistic Diversity category.

About Meri Panchayat App

Meri Panchayat App is an m-Governance Platform for Panchayats of India.
Developed by: The Ministry of Panchayati Raj & National Informatics Centre (NIC)
Reach: It empowers over 25 lakh elected representatives and serves around 950 million rural citizens across 2.65 lakh Gram Panchayats.
Linguistic Diversity: The app supports 12 Indian languages, promoting inclusivity through a multilingual user interface.
Impact on Governance
- Ensures real-time access to panchayat budgets, payments, receipts, and development plans.
- Citizens can access Gram Panchayat Development Plans (GPDPs) , track projects, view Gram Sabha decisions, and raise grievances with geo-tagged and geo-fenced evidence.
- It enhances transparency, accountability, and grassroots participation by enabling citizens to propose, rate, and review local works.
- Bridges the digital divide and promotes participatory democracy in rural governance.

The World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) Prizes are awarded by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) to recognize outstanding digital projects.

The forum is hosted annually by the ITU and co-organized by several UN organizations.
The WSIS Forum’s process aligns with that of the SDGs.
The forum’s program is collaboratively curated through crowdsourcing, promoting extensive ownership and facilitating continual improvements.
The WSIS+20 High-Level Event 2025, held in Geneva marked two decades of global digital cooperation.
The forum was co-hosted by ITU and the Swiss Confederation and co-organized by ITU, UNESCO, UNDP, and UNCTAD.

The award honors efforts aligned with inclusive, people-centric information society development.
Categories: The Prizes categories are aligned with the WSIS Action Lines, which are derived from the Geneva Plan of Action.
- These categories cover various aspects of ICTs (Information and Communication Technologies) and their impact on development.
Total 18 winning projects and 72 champion projects were awarded at the WSIS Prize 2025 Ceremony at the WSIS+20 High-Level Event 2025

WSIS is a UN process that involves more than 32 UN Agencies and is built on the framework of the 11 WSIS Action Lines.
Members: Digital cooperation within UN Agencies including the Governments, Private Sector, Civil Society, Academia and the Technical Community.
Goal: To achieve a common vision, desire and commitment to build a people-centric, inclusive and development-oriented information and knowledge societies where everyone can create, access, utilize and share information.

Additional Reading: ITU

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