The Government Information Center

The Government Information Center (GIC) is a single, electronic, trilingual (Sinhala, Tamil and English), online knowledge base of 1,600 services available to citizens from 77 key government organizations. The related procedures that need to be followed in order to make use of each of these services are also stored in the database. Obtaining a particular government service used to involve navigating through a thicket of organizations and making multiple personal visits and repeated telephone calls. Language was a further barrier for the 25% of Sri Lankan citizens who speak Tamil. The GIC was established as a public/private partnership to provide a single point of access to information concerning government services in an effective and friendly manner. The knowledge base, stored in an SQL database, is available through multiple channels, including a Microsoft Visual Basic interface for call center staff, a web based interface for the IT-literate general public, and, to accommodate future expansion, a web services API.