Govt Approves Rs 1L Crore For Digital India Project; E-Governance To Get Major Push

Indian Government has approved Digital India project, and allocated a budget of Rs 1 Lakh crore to implement it. PM Narendra Modi will spearhead the project, which is expected to be implemented before 2019.

Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said, “Today the Cabinet has approved the Digital India initiative of PM Narendra Modi. The PM had promised to bring everyone under the umbrella of ‘Digital India’. India’s talent plus information technology are India’s tomorrow,”

What Will Happen Now?

Under Digital India project, a specially empowered ‘Digital India Advisory Group’ would be formed, which will be headed by the Minister of IT and Communications, along with an ‘Apex Committee’ headed by a Cabinet Secretary and ‘Expenditure Finance Committee (EFC) or Committee’ on Non Plan Expenditure (CNE).

These committees and government bodies will work on implementing the National E-governance policies and plans.

The nine most important growth areas where this new project of Digital India will work are:

1. Broadband highways to connect all villages and cities of India
2. Everywhere mobile connectivity; wherein mobile coverage will be provided to every nook and corner of India
3. Public Internet Access Program wherein internet accessibility to the web will be provided at subsidized rates (example public WiFis)
4. eGovernance in every government department, wherein 100% paper-less environment will be encouraged
5. e-Kranti, wherein government services would be electronically delivered
6. Information for All policy (which includes provisioning of Right to Information using the Internet as a medium)
7. Electronics manufacturing
8. IT for Jobs
9. Early harvest program

Action Plans for Digital India

Digital India project’s main aim is to “transform India into digital empowered society and knowledge economy”. All central government ministries and departments have been instructed to come up with unique and innovative plans and services which can be delivered directly to the public, using the digital medium. For example provision to provide health and medical details of all citizens online, education initiatives and plans and judiciary decisions.

National Informatics Center will provide the IT infrastructure to roll out digital initiatives, besides a special Chief Information Officer (CIO) will be appointed in atleast 10 major ministries to facilitate conceptualization, implementation and measurement of all Digital India plans.

Insiders are also stating that the government is keen to forge Public-Private partnership to spread the growth and usage of Digital medium everywhere possible.

This is certainly one of those ‘big news’ for the country as this project is expected to create thousands of new jobs and enterprises for implementing the Digital India plans. We will update you as more details are updated by the government regarding this new initiative.

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