Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday launched a unified app to serve e-governance through mobile devices. Called Umang (Unified Mobile Application for New-age Governance), the app is developed by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) and National e-Governance Division (NeGD) to offer services of the central, state, local bodies, and various government agencies right on Android and iOS based mobile devices. The new offering had emerged on the sidelines of the fifth Global Conference on Cyberspace (GCCS) in New Delhi.

"Today, we launched the Umang Mobile App, which will provide over a hundred citizen-centric services. At the back-end, these services will be catered for by many different departments of the Union and State Governments. This integrated approach will add an automatic layer of 'peer performance pressure', in the working of these departments," Prime Minister Modi said while addressing the audience at GCCS.

The Umang app bundles a list of Digital India services, including Aadhaar, DigiLocker, and PayGov. Additionally, the app provides citizens with all the major government services provided through app, web, SMS, and IVR channels. In terms of e-governance, citizens can use the Umang app to access their income tax filing, LPG cylinder bookings, and Provident Fund account. Parents can also use the Umang app to access CBSE results. It has multilingual support with as many as 10 Indian languages in addition to Hindi and English and includes a payment-based transaction access.

Unlike any third-party apps to access e-governance services, the Umang app supports Aadhaar and other authentication mechanisms such as your phone number and location to give you single-point ubiquitous access to all government services.

You need to register your identity to start using the Umang app. The registration process begins with an OTP (one-time password) that will be generated to your provided mobile number. You'll also need to choose a couple of security questions and fill in their answers that will help you recover the Umang account. Once you've completed the registration, the app will ask you to set an MPIN that will be used alongside your mobile number to access the app.

Also, the Umang app has social media integration that allows you to connect your Facebook, Google, and Twitter accounts and enable one-touch login process.

The interface of the Umang app appears to be convenient for novices. Similarly, the app comes with features like favourites and push notification alerts to help you leverage the benefits of e-governance in the country. There is a support option available on the app to help citizens reach experts for their doubts related to the app or its listed services. However, that option didn't connect us with one of the agents at the time of our testing.

The Umang app is compatible with devices running Android 4.4 and above and iOS 8.0 and later. Moreover, you can give a missed call on 97183-97183 to get the app download link on your number.