If you are not used to paying your electricity bill and other bills online you better get ready for the E-Kranti, The Digital India project which has been approved by the cabinet at an outlay of Rs 1 Lakh crore rupees.
Digital India: Video Version
What Is it?
The government's Rs. 1,00,000 crore-plus initiative's blueprint envisions a paradigm shift in many aspects of public life within three years.
- All cities with more than 10 lakh people -- including tourist centres -- will get public WiFi hotspots.
- In terms of rural penetration, the government aims to double the number of villages presently covered, bringing Internet to 2.5 lakh villages.
- All citizen services, such as passport applications, will be moved to cloud-based systems.
- Nearly 250,000 government schools will be connected to broadband and free wireless Internet.
- All school books must also be made available in electronic versions by that time.
This is really exciting, imagine all villages around India connected and imagine them tapping into the power of the universal knowledge databank also known as the internet. The scheme aims to provide telemedicine and distant education to the remotest of areas.
With this ambitious project, villagers will not have to travel long distances to the concerned departments. A Digital India Advisory Group will be formed and will be chaired by the Minister of Communications and IT.
This ambitious project is bringing broadband to places where even toilets don’t exist, will we be able to execute effectively and make this a reality?
Meeting Industry Leaders
Mark Zuckerberg met with the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's and spoke about the Digital India programme. Mark himself is on a mission, dubbed internet.org which aims to bring internet to everyone.
Is India changing, yes! One bit at a time.
How Will This Programme Help?
- E-governance is one of the best ways to fight corruption and make India an easy place to run business. Thus, this investment of $20 billion can be got back in no time [assuming it is executed well].
- The more the government services move online, better the time saving. Imagine all the hours people wait outside passport offices.
- Public Wi-Fi would make Internet both affordable and ubiquitous. This would enable better reach of education and also greatly help home grown Internet companies. That means more jobs, more tax revenues.
- Digitising books although is not an alternative to real books will decrease the overall cost to study.
But there is one problem, internet access requires stable electricity, how are we going to get stable electricity in remote areas when even metros have power issues?