Madam Speaker, I would like to thank the hon. Member for the question. With regard to the apps, it seems there has been an explosion of mobile apps in the way it has been implemented. In the journey towards building a digitally empowered and inclusive society, Madam Speaker, ministries, departments and parastatal bodies have around 40 mobile apps. However, these applications were not done in a cohesive manner and the approach was not holistic. The Ministry has been characterised by a series of lack of fundamental principles of establishing a digital infrastructure. It would be unimaginable that today, a country like Mauritius does not have a disaster recovery site for our main government data centre. Madam Speaker, this implies that should the Atal Bihari Vajpayee building catch fire and the servers are down, all government services, including the parliamentary services, would not be available to the public. This, to me, is a crime when it comes to what the public expects us to do when we sit in Parliament!

66 Now we know why the people responsible for doing it in the previous government did not have the time to do it. They were queuing up in Burj Dubai for the discotheques! Now, MoKloud is one of the apps on which the question rests. So, it is good that I highlight to the House that MoKloud provides citizens with online access to official documents, such as birth certificates and marriage certificates. So, citizens can apply for these certificates and they can store it online in a secured manner. This is what MoKloud does. MoKloud is available today. There is another app on which the question has been asked, which is called MauPass. MauPass creates the bridge between the physical and the virtual world. It means that if I have a mobile ID, this is my ID in the physical world. What is my ID in the virtual world so that the government can endorse any claim that I make of being the person I am or I claim to be. Therefore, this is what Maupass does. It a critical application for our digital infrastructure. It is actually not surprising when we see the level of incompetence to state that MoKloud is deprived of a legal basis today. Now, this, again, is a matter that we are addressing with the Office of the Attorney General. A third application is MoRendezVous. It is good for the Members of the House to know that MoRendezVous allows citizens to plan meetings. It has been deployed for more than seven years. To date, there are only 5,000 users of MoRendezVous. That is good to know that the users/department that use MoKloud the most is the Passport and Immigration Office. We could have reduced the queues at the office for passport application processing, but we still see the queues, which means that this app did not really meet its objectives! The fourth one is Mwa Mo Wallet which enables citizens to store their digital documents again. This is applicable to Mauritius and all the outer islands. It is good to note that all the users are suffering from a lack of features within these applications. And there are three others, actually. So, whenever there was a problem highlighted, the approach was: ‘okay, let us develop an app to address that problem.’ But that is not how we digitalise the country, Madam Speaker! There has to be an approach, a strategy, a server, and data. We do not just sit in an office in Ebène and we wake up and we say: ‘let us develop an app’! Apps like MoPri, MoBis, MoKouran, kiete sa ? All these apps, Madam Speaker, have cost money! It has cost taxpayer’s money! The worst of all is that it has cost us a lot of time. When we say that we have lost these ten sweet years in terms of digitalisation, when we realise the impact of that loss, the impact on our government processes, the impact on the

67 expectations of Gen Z and Gen Alpha, it is big! It is really big because MoKouran and MoPri are not what our people expect. Our people expect to have a super app which actually aggregates all the government applications. This is what they expect. This is what they deserve! This is what they pay their taxes for! The former government has failed! And the Ministry of Information Technology, represented by the previous Minister for IT, has failed miserably! An hon. Member: Laptop inn eklate !

‘Eklate’ some people say! Madam Speaker, there has been a low uptake of those users. Interestingly, it is a well- known fact that we cannot manage what we do not measure. There has been no measurement of the users of those apps. The user-friendliness of those apps actually tells that the apps were not really friendly to users! They were like an enemy to users, like do not use me! We mentioned the absence of the legal basis. Madam Speaker, in the forthcoming blueprint for the ICT sector, priority has been set to actually rationalise all these applications into a single one so that it becomes a single window for all citizens for ease of access. These apps will be user friendly. My Ministry has already started working on a single unified app which will ensure a streamlining of services, reduce redundancies, provide a standard interface, cater for multiple languages and provide for the use of Single Sign-On. So, with Maupass, you sign-in once, you have access to a series of applications. The committee is a multi-stakeholder committee that has been established within my Ministry together with the Central Informatics Bureau, Mauritius Emerging Technologies Council and the Mauritius Digital Promotion Agency. This is an ambitious and forward-looking project, Madam Speaker. We want to actually develop this in an efficient manner so that there is also a good uptake by the citizens. There will be an accompanying communication campaign so that we advise and we sensitise the population around the advantages of using this app. The whole objective, Madam Speaker, as has been stipulated in our Government Programme, is to move citizens from being in line to being online. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

Thank you so much, very interesting. Yes, Mr Caserne, you are okay with that? Good! So, now we go to Ms Anquetil.

68 JEUX INTER COLLÈGES – REINSTATEMENT