discover india app launched by tourism ministry india

The Ministry of Tourism has launched a mobile application to enable its users to independently travel and experience 16 cities in the country. The self-guided tour application ‘Incredible India Walking Tours’ was launched by the Ministry in collaboration with Genesys International Corporation and will cover 16 Indian cities including Agra, Amritsar, Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Bhopal, Chandigarh, Chennai, Delhi, Coastal Goa, Hyderabad, Jaipur, Kolkata, Mumbai, Patna, Pune and Surat. The facility will be extended to 36 cities by December 2015. The app enables users to sight-see free of cost at their own pace and convenience, with the help of walking tours curated by travel experts. “We are extremely excited about this because it is the first time an app can enable users to discover India on their own. It’s free, easy to use and, most importantly, comes with 360 degree street views and information put together by a panel of experts. It’s like having a local take you by the hand and show you his city, at your convenience,” Tourism Minister Sripad Naik said. The application, however, is only available on Blackberry mobile handsets. It runs on all BlackBerry 10 handsets including the Z3, Z10, Z30, Q5 and Q10 phones. An Android version of the free application is also being worked upon and is expected to be announced in coming weeks, said a senior Tourism Ministry official.

Murthy blames 'poor' public governance for country's ills

Bangalore: Software icon N R Narayana Murthy today blamed poor public governance for major ills faced by the country such as illiteracy, malnourishment, lack of sanitation facilities and dismal food and power management.



Even 63 years after independence, 35 crore Indians can't read and write. Twenty-five crore people do not have access to safe drinking water, while 75 crore have no access to sanitation facilities, Murthy said.

"The country has the largest mass of malnourished children, and 35 per cent of (total production of) grains are allowed to rot," the Chief Mentor of Infosys Technologies Ltd said at the inaugural function of first year BE/B.Arch classes at BMS College of Engineering here.
He said India has an installed electricity generation capacity of 145 gigawatts but only 84 gigawatts are available, which is "sadly a shame".

"Lot of it is due to poor (public) governance. There is no doubt about it", Murthy said.

"Unfortunately, whatever, our public governance is in charge of....Whatever our public governance has touched...Has not made as good a progress as that happened in a significant percentage of private governance".

He said while all of private governance may not be good, private governance institutions have by and large done better because of competition, entry of multinational companies and the need to compete at the global level.

"This country requires discipline like no other country. We are like this because we are not a disciplined set of people. And that discipline has to start right in classrooms," Murthy said.

He said the information technology industry has earned India "a little bit of recognition" in the world, first time in 300 years.

"Today we are thought of as people who can indeed do something worthwhile. This was not so some 25 years ago. Indians (till three decades ago) were seen as people incapable of doing anything worthwhile. Wherever you went, you were looked down upon as people worthy of pity. But that scenario has changed a little bit thanks to at least one(IT) industry," he said.

Source: Business Standard