“A country that needs to be taught where to go for toilet, wants to go Digital” a ridicule remark by many. Really it needs guts to talk about digital India in a country where more than three hundred million Indians do not have even electricity facility.
The PM of India on 1st July 2015, announced to go digital. A past master in statesmanship, PM Modi, didn’t even bat an eyelid before announcing this initiative to connect people of the rural and urban India. This initiative aims to make India a better governing place facilitating Indians with electronic government services, reducing paper work, improving work efficiency and saving time. This ambitious project will transform India into a complete digital country with efficient and transparent e-governance.
Digital India is a dream wherein country is to be empowered with digital infrastructure and services, online availability of information and integration of many departments for hassle free e-governance. Digital India campaign aims at ensuring the broadband highways and universal access to mobile phones. It not only aims at e-governance but also ensures more IT jobs for the general public. This program will be implemented in phases till 2019 and will be monitored by the Digital India Advisory Group chaired by the Ministry of Communication and IT.
This initiative includes plans to connect rural India with high speed internet network. Under this visionary program a two way platform will be created where the service providers and consumers shall be benefitted. It will include inter-ministerial e-governance connecting services like public health care, education, housing, banks etc. This program will act like an umbrella program covering several departments.
This highly ambitious program needs strong pillars. The first requirement is that all the people of India, even of the remotest villages, must have universal access to mobiles and high speed internet. Broadband services will have to be made available to 2.5 lakh villages and 400 thousand public internet access points will have to be created. Around 2.5 lakh schools, all universities and public places must have wi-fi hotspots. Success of e-governance (Reforming govt. through technology) and e-Kranti (electronic delivery of services) are must for this program to see the daylight. A wonderful thing about this project is, it may bring smile on the face of unemployed youths due to huge possibility of job opportunities in India.
Besides this every Indian citizen can avail himself of a digital locker facility which will help him to store important document like PAN card, Passport, Marksheet and degrees. The digital locker provides a dedicated personal storage space in the cloud to citizen linked to their Adhaar Number. Whether this program turns into reality or remain an illusion, time will tell but the government has taken a giant leap forward to transform the country into a digitally empowered one.
Hurdles have started obstructing the path of this program. To start with not a single telecom operator or industry house has signed up to partner the ‘National Optical Fibre Network’ (NOFN) program. NOFN is responsible to lay nationwide optical fiber framework to connect all the Gram Panchayats within three years. Infact this program must be called ‘Digital Bharat’ program because we need to connect with the rural parts of India. Laying optical fiber cables is just one of the challenges; the gigantic one will be to ensure functional broadband points at each panchayat, distribution of internet services and finally their usage by the rural folk.
Digital India reflects out of the box thinking of the present government. The beauty of a natural digital platform is transparency that puts more information in public domain and doesn’t hide anything. This digital world is going to be a part of our life. In near future and whether we like it or not we will be in the flow of this digital river.
