DIGITAL INDIA - TO MAKE BHARAT INTO INDIA

By Ruma Dubey

First ‘Make in India’ and now ‘Digital India’.

Modi known for his oratory skills, surely has come up with some great slogans. While skepticism over Make in India remains, this new ambition of Digital India, as expected is grandiose. The aim, apart from connecting the entire country digitally, is to garner more investment in the IT sector, set up more companies and create employment opportunities.

Let’s take a breezy look into the main aspects of this initiative:

It’s a Rs.1.13 lakh crore plan and extremely aspirational. The vision - to empower every citizen with access to digital services, knowledge and information; use policies and best practices from around the world to make this vision of a digital India a reality. Wow!

The tasks to be covered under Digital India

• Citizen Centric Applications – this will include use of IT and e-platform for National Scholarship, eHospital services, one-stop center offering multiple citizen services in a transparent and secured manner for easier and faster experience (Meeseva), use of XLN Software for Food & Drugs Control Administration work – right from licensing, product testing, recalls, samping, etc; and Human Resource Management System (HRMS) - to store and retrieve all relevant details of government employees into a single unified system.
• Using mobile phones as instruments for Digital Identity to facilitate the delivery of online services more easily.
• Integrate farms with technology
• Strengthening optical fibre cable network – the required grid for high speed networks for this digital dream.
• To connect all schools in India via broadband and provide them free wi-fi.
• Put in place a digital locker system to bring down hassles of physical documents and enable e-sharing of documents.
• To engage citizens in governance issues through the website MyGov.in\
• To provide high-speed internet to connect all the 2,50,000 gram panchayats across India.
• BSNL to work on replacing 30-year old telephone exchanges and develop wi-fi hotspots across India.
• Electronics Development Fund to promote innovation, research and product development to create a resource pool within the country as also a self-sustaining eco-system of venture funds.
• National Centre for Flexible Electronics to promote research and innovation in the emerging area of flexible electronics.
• To create Centre of Excellence on Internet on Things (IoT) – JV between Govt and private sector institutes like Nasscom.

These are some, not all of the initiatives under the proposed Digital India plan. It does sound like something out of Utopia, something which we all would dream of. But once again, how does one go about achieving this? Mere rhetoric with no action plans will not work for too long.

Just like the Make in India initiative, these will have its own set of challenges. How will the dream of Digital India get fulfilled if there continues to remain a spectrum crunch? And if spectrum is made available, will the cost be so exorbitant that it will break the back of the companies while increasing the cost for the people? This scarcity of spectrum is a very real issue and it would have been appreciated if the speech by the PM, apart from these ambitious plans, had also talked about how the Govt plans to get there.

That apart, we also need to work on resolving issues of power scarcity, providing digital literacy to the babus and village panchayats. And do we have universally accessible digital resources? What about getting the Govt machineries ready for eGovernance and Mgovernance? Most important of all – what is the level of transparency we can expect when government activities go digital. We ask this pertinent question because all communication with Modi is one-way only – he decides what to talk, when and what information to give. So the fear that he is treading on the footsteps of Chinese President Xi is very real. And we say this because Make in India is yet to make any headway – and frankly this is the Chinese model (read more at : https://www.sptulsian.com/article/84385/open-letter-to-modiji)

Yes, this is an excellent and very proud India moment. This vision is tremendous but we now need to see the will and action – talk alone has stopped getting the people excited.