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Sunday, July 20, 2025

Works Ministry goes public with new app

by

20140731

Works Min­is­ter Su­ru­jrat­tan Ram­bachan wants to en­sure that his min­istry is run in an ef­fi­cient, busi­ness like man­ner."It is not on­ly about what is hap­pen­ing with­in the walls of the min­istry, but road works, land­slips, road clo­sures and al­ter­na­tive routes. One of the goals of the min­istry is to re­duce the stress of the pub­lic and the stress of the con­sumer by how we do busi­ness.

"I see the Min­istry of Works as a busi­ness. We must be cus­tomer fo­cused and cus­tomer cen­tric," he said yes­ter­day at the launch of Works and In­fra­struc­ture In­for­ma­tion Zone Elec­tron­ic-por­tal (WIZE), a Min­istry of Works mo­bile app, at the Con­fer­ence Cen­tre, Movie Towne, In­vaders Bay.

The app pro­vides a mo­bile av­enue of two way com­mu­ni­ca­tion be­tween the Min­istry of Works and the pub­lic.It can be down­loaded at Gog­gle apps Store but is cur­rent­ly on­ly avail­able for An­droid-based de­vices.

Some of the fea­tures in­clude:

No­tices-A list of top­ics of in­ter­est and ad­vice, where nec­es­sary, of ac­tion to be tak­en.

Pho­to Gal­leries-Pho­to al­bums which will keep the pub­lic up-to-date on the progress and ac­tiv­i­ties of the min­istry.

Traf­fic Cams-Click­ing on a list item will dis­play a live video stream of the traf­fic at var­i­ous cam­era lo­ca­tions.

Map-An in­ter­ac­tive map dis­plays the lo­ca­tion of sev­er­al types of works tak­ing place across the coun­try.

Ram­bachan said of­ten there had been lack of in­for­ma­tion and an in­abil­i­ty to give feed­back to the pub­lic."While I was at the Min­istry of Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment I was try­ing to pur­chase a fa­cil­i­ty like this and they went out for ten­ders and the cost of buy­ing an app like this from a com­pa­ny in In­dia was over $1 mil­lion. This is one of the most sig­nif­i­cant things I have en­coun­tered over the last four years at three min­istries," he said.The min­is­ter said in the cur­rent fis­cal year un­der the PURE pro­gramme there are 740 projects in progress, which means 740 lo­ca­tions through­out the coun­try.

"Un­der the URP pro­gramme there are 753 projects. Un­der the High­ways Di­vi­sion, 285 projects have been com­plet­ed. This means for this fis­cal year, there are 1,965 projects be­ing done in the coun­try. Can you imag­ine what it is to dri­ve to every one of these lo­ca­tions? Now we can take this app and pass it on to all the dis­trict of­fices and train them on how to give you feed­back," he said.

Ram­bachan said the app cuts away ex­cess time and cost and re­duces the "un­nec­es­sary an­i­mos­i­ty" be­tween the min­istry and pub­lic."In a coun­try where the pub­lic has a high val­ue of the right to know, they just do not want to know that a road is be­ing built, they want to know the cost of thee road. They want to know if the pub­lic is get­ting val­ue for mon­ey," the min­is­ter said.


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