THINGS TO KNOW ABOUT DIGITAL INDIA
• Digital India is a massive tech push to provide electronic governance and universal phone connectivity across the country. The aim is to bridge India ' s digital divide, bringing in large investments in technology manufacturing.
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The PM described Digital India as a roadmap to change India ' s future. " Earlier, a child used to playfully wrench your reading glasses ", he said, " today, he reaches for your phone. We need to understand this change or the world will pass us by."
" E-Governance is going to change into M-Governance... M is not Modi Governance, it is mobile governance," the PM said with a smile, sketching a broad roadmap in his 27-minute speech of how he plans to digitise India.
Reliance Industries Ltd plans to invest about 2.5 lakh crore($ 39.3 billion) in digital initiatives, Chairman Mukesh Ambani said, though he did not indicate a timeline. " Normally, industry moves faster than government ", he said," but with Digital India, I have no hesitation in saying the government has moved faster."
But the push to connect India and drive a national fibre optic network, approved by the previous Congress-led government in 2011, has made slow progress in utilizing technology to bring services and deliverables to those outside large towns and cities. The Government of India has undertaken an initiative namely Bharat Net, a high speed digital highway to connect all 2.5 lakh Gram Panchayats of country. This would be the world ' s largest rural broadband connectivity project using optical fibre.
Telecom Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad has said that during Digital India Week, the government expects " billions of dollars in investment ", critical for a government that needs to create more jobs quickly.
eSign framework would allow citizens to digitally sign a document online using Aadhaar authentication.
Digital Locker System aims to minimize the usage of physical documents and enable sharing of e- documents across agencies. The sharing of the e-documents will be done through registered repositories thereby ensuring the authenticity of the documents online, says the government.
Centre of Excellence on Internet on Things( IoT) is a joint initiative of Department of Electronics & Information Technology( DeitY), ERNET and NASSCOM. IoT development in India is sure to get pace now.
At the event today, Cyrus Mistry said the Tata Group would hire 60,000 IT professionals this year, and Kumaramangalam Birla said his Aditya Birla Group will invest Rs. 44,500 crore($ 7 billion) in the next five years in the infra and digital space. Supporting the Digital India initiative, world ' s largest software maker Microsoft Corp says it will help GOI in efforts to " transform " country