Once a Karmayogi...always a Karmayogi

As I hand over the charge of the office of CEO Karmayogi to my successor, its time for me to express my thanks and gratitude to my Karmayogi team members – for contributing to making Karmayogi Bharat, what it is today. Last two years has been one of my most satisfying work experiences in my entire career.

I still remember vividly, when I joined in July 2022, this posting, even though it was as an additional charge, seemed to be one of the most challenging yet promising assignments, I have ever had in my career. Mission Karmayogi - National Program for Civil Services Capacity Building, launched under the vision of Hon'ble Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi, for creating a future-ready civil service, that can help take India on the path of development as also move from 'Rule-based to Role based Governance', had my role cut out. It was a high priority program that was being monitored at the highest levels and needed prompt and quick action.

I had few thoughts of what needed to be done as all my years in civil service, I always felt the need for having a platform for continuous learning and building capacities in the civil service to be able to face the challenges we face in the ever-changing world. 28 years back, without any Internet, as we know today, I would look through the District Library of Mokokchung to get books and resources to get insights into culture, customs and traditions of Nagaland – a totally new, exciting and beautiful place about which we hardly learnt anything in school or college. The best sources for me to learn, then was the District Gazetter prepared by the British and also the tour diaries of ICS officers who wrote in long hand, details of villages they visited, cases they settled with very graphic insights of people, places, practices and more.

Since then, one has always wanted to get more and more reliable sources of knowledge and information that can help us in being able to do our jobs better. Most of the sources of knowledge, insights and information has been unstructured and informal and we would share ideas and thoughts with people whom we knew or could reach out to. One did have the opportunity to go for mid-career trainings off and on, but there was no source for continuous learning on diverse subjects.

Thus the opportunity to build a platform like IGoT Karmayogi was godsend and I could see so many possibilities. With the support of DoPT, CBC and Karmayogi Board, my team was able to quickly conceptualise, design, architect and build the platform. It was like building a Startup. We started with just about 3-5 team members, in a tiny work space at the NDCC building. We had humble beginnings but big dreams. We wanted to scale up quickly but were also wary of the risks involved. The support that we got from our chairperson Shri S Ramadorai and Board members Govind Iyer, Pankaj Bansal (पंकज बंसल), Debjani Ghosh, Dr. Nirmaljeet Singh Kalsi IAS (retd), Dr. Santrupt Misra, Secretary DoPT – Radha Chauhan and Ajay Bhalla and Secretary MeitY - S Krishnan and Alkesh Kumar Sharma was amazing and helped us design the whole platform and strategy. I also got a lot of support from Adil Zainulbhai, R Balasubramaniam, Praveen Pardeshi, Alka Mittal, S P Roy and Hemang Jani of the Capacity Building Commission. The team that we were able to build was the key to what  we have been able to create. I am immensely grateful to my team members Rakesh Verma, Monojeet Chakravorty, Ashish Pai, Shobhana Rana, Shubho Sengupta, Rana Pratap Singh, Samta Simmy, Dinesh who put in real hard work in building the platform. Younger colleagues – Vinayak, Shubham, Nidhi, Ankita, Pawan, Muddu, Priyamvada, Rakshanda, Henry, Akshay, Abhimanyu contributed immensely with their energy, enthusiasm and dedication. Our partners from Tarento – Vijay, Ranga, Mohit, Mathew, Astha, Himashu, Vikram, Arjun, Nitika played a critical role in stabilizing the platform as we were scaling up. The content providers, MDOs, stakeholders from World Bank – Neha, Bhawana, Vikram – all were so supportive that we could move very fast in building this robust platform. It was such a coordinated approach with all stakeholders working in unision that we were able to reach the milestones of 4.2 million users and 11 million course completions in around 18 months. I am sure that the platform will grow and soon there will be more content – citizen-centric courses – in all Indian languages. Tech enhancements like incorporating Artificial Intelligence features, and case study-based courses will help IGoT become more practice-oriented.

I am sure very soon IGoT will become the best Capacity Building Platform, globally. Given that its built on Open Source platform, it is already becoming a DPI that India can be proud of. And with so much of content, coming in, I would hope that next time, anyone gets posted in a remote location, he would be able to explore so much more on Igotkarmayogi.gov.in rather than going to a district library with limited resources.