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July - 2015 issue

Digital India Week

By CR Team

Digital India, an umbrella scheme, flagged off by Prime Minister on July 1st, aims at empowering citizens with the use of IT and promoting digital literacy with planned investments of Rs.4.5 trillion, and hires of 1.8 million people, over the next 5-10 years.

The basic products of this initiative are : Digital Locker, National Scholarship Portal, eHospital,eSign and Digitise India Platform. Apart from the products, the apps launched are: MyGov Mobile App, Swachh Bharat Mission App, BharatNet, Wi-Fi Hotspots and Next Generation Network (NGN). The initiative also includes opening of two institutions: Centre for Flexible Electronics and Centre of Excellence for Internet of Things (IoT). Electronics Development Fund Policy is also a part of this initiative. Being a major part of telecom industry, Reliance Industries Ltd, Tata group, Wipro Ltd and Reliance Group, have announced significant investments and initiatives towards the Digital India initiative.

Reliance Industries pledges to invest over Rs.2,50,000 crore through Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd,4G-based high-speed data communications services that will roll out an internet protocol-based wireless broadband infrastructure across all 29 states in India. Whereas Reliance Group has pledged to invest Rs 10,000 crore to fund transformational initiatives across the cloud, digital and telecom space.

Tata group would be a part of government’s digitization initiative with e-passport sewa and electronic income-tax returns filing.

Aditya Birla Group plans to invest over $2 billion over next five years on projects like electronics manufacturing, energy storage, Internet of Things and smart cities.

Another important part of Digital India mission, Bharti Airtel Ltd, commits to spend in excess of Rs.1 trillion in the next five years, for building additional infrastructure and taking 4G to the masses,among other things.

Vedanta Resources Plc plans to manufacture LCD panels in India entailing an investment of Rs.40,000 crore leading to employment opportunities to 50,000 people and cutting down electronic imports worth Rs. 20,000 crore.

BSNL already has 55 Next Generation Network in place to replace 30-year-old exchanges; their number will grow to 683 by year end. BSNL also has 53 active Wi-Fi hotspots, and aims to have 2500 Wi-Fi hotspots by the end of 2015.

More than 100 partners are celebrating Digital India Week along with IIT Bombay, who showcased some projects like: Spoken Tutorial, FOSSEE, e-Yantra, e-kalpa, Virtual Labs and many more.

So the main motive of “Digital India” is to transform India into a digitally empowered society and knowledge economy by providing Internet access to all by creating digital infrastructure, delivering government services on the Web and mobile on-demand.