Creating a digitally empowered society
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ‘Digital India’ campaign aims at creating a digitally empowered society and knowledge economy.
The programme comprises various initiatives, each targeted to prepare India for bringing good governance to the people through synchronised and coordinated engagement of the entire government.
Rajiv Gandhi, during his tenure as Prime Minister, took revolutionary steps to change the Indian communication and information technology scene. Prior to Rajiv Gandhi’s era, neither the citizens nor the government was aware of information technology.
He introduced the first computer in India. It looked like a typewriter placed before a television set. The e-governance initiatives in India acquired a broader dimension in the mid90s for wider sectoral applications with an emphasis on citizen centric services. Later on, many states and union territories started various e-governance projects.
Though these e-governance projects were citizen-centric, they could make less than the desired impact.
The government of India launched the National e-Governance Plan (NeGP) in 2006. As many as 31 Mission Mode Projects covering various domains were initiated. Despite the successful implementation of many projects across the country, e-governance as a whole has not been able to make the desired impact and fulfil all its objectives.
It has been felt that a lot more thrust is required to ensure e-governance in the country to promote inclusive growth that covers electronic services, products, devices and job opportunities. Moreover, electronic manufacturing in the country needs to be strengthened.
In order to transform the entire ecosystem of public services through the use of information technology, the government of India has launched the Digital India programme.
This project has been approved by the PM and is expected to be completed by 2019. The success of this programme would be a dream come true for Narendra Modi. The aim is to facilitate Indian citizens with electronic government services in order to reduce paperwork, improve work efficiency and save time.
The Digital India project was launched by the prime minister on July 1, 2015. It is an effective scheme to transform India for better growth and development of the people and country. Digital India Week (from July 1 to 7) was inaugurated by the PM in the presence of senior ministerial colleagues and the CEOs of leading companies.
It aims to give India a digital push for good governance and more jobs. The PM has tried his best towards digitising campaign for India in order to bridge the gap between government services and people. Digitisation was the need of the hour in India.
There are three key vision areas of this programme which are:
• Digital infrastructure will make available high speed internet delivering all the government services with ease..
The first step of Digital India is access to high quality broadband and at least a smartphone for all. But to make broadband affordable and accessible, one needs to keep in mind certain ground realities. India is a diverse country, in terms of language, culture, laws which vary from states to states. Complete integration, that is integration of technology and language, is one of the main challenges the mission would face in its implementation.
India will need massive data centres with mirroring i.e. all data will need to be backed up at an alternate site. This will require large investment to set up state-of-the-art data centres in various parts of India.
Today, most Indians hold email accounts with Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo along with using messaging services like WhatsApp and Viber, which all run on servers located outside India.
This makes all individuals and by extension, the country, vulnerable to surveillance and privacy breach, as shown by snooping done by NSA, of the United States. India must offer all the above services including cloud storage, to all Indians. Of course, this will entail massive investment in technology and infrastructure. Furthering the benefits of Digital India, the roadmap ahead looks promising.
By the year 2019, 2.5 lakh villages will have broadband connection along with the added feature of phone connectivity. The imports of the country will turn zero as India will have a staggering 400,000 public internet access points. Not only that, over 2.5 lakh educational institutions, including schools and universities, will have Wi-Fi facility.
The programme aims to impact the employment scenario immensely by increasing skills and job prospects. It is estimated that by 2019, about 1.7 crore young Indians will have proper training in IT, telecom and electronics. This directly leads to 1.7 crore jobs for Indian youth in about four years from now.
The Digital India programme is a great opportunity to develop the digital backbone in the country. The programme will generate huge number of IT, Telecom and Electronics jobs, both directly and indirectly. The writer is a Class
9 student