DIGITAL INFRASTRUCTURE: CORE OF GOVERNANCE

Relevance: mains: G.S paper III: Awareness in the fields of IT, Space, Computers: infrastructure

What is Digital Infrastructure?

• The Digital Infrastructure is defined as the ability to store and exchange data through a centralized communication system.

What are the key components of Digital Infrastructure for Government?

• National Informatics Centre (NIC NET): National Informatics Centre (NIC) was established in 1976, and has since emerged as a “prime builder” of eGovernment / e-Governance applications up to the grassroots level as well as a promoter of digital opportunities for sustainable development.
• NIC, through its ICT Network, “NICNET”, has institutional linkages with all the Ministries /Departments of the Central Government, 35 State Governments/ Union Territories, and about 625 District administrations of India.
• NIC has been instrumental in steering eGovernment/e-Governance applications in government ministries/departments at the Centre, States, Districts and Blocks, facilitating improvement in government services, wider transparency, promoting decentralized planning and management, resulting in better efficiency and accountability to the people of India.
• NIC’s PAN-India connectivity and reach is one of its key strengths and this coupled with its enhanced ability to detect and prevent attacks would collectively upscale the Government’s ability to protect its data.
• National Knowledge Network (NKN): he NKN will provide nation-wide ultra high speed backbone/data-network highway.
• Various other networks in the country can take advantage of this ultra high speed backbone, with national and international reach to create independent and closed user groups.
• The participating institutions can connect to the NKN at speeds of 10 Gbps or to the distribution layer through a last mile connectivity bandwidth.
• The cloud-enabled National Data Centre will provide benefits like on-demand access to ICT (Information and Communication Technology) infrastructure for easy availability and quick deployment of applications and standardized platforms of deployment.
• It offer round-the-clock operations with secure hosting for various e-governance applications of Central and State Governments and has ability to support 35,000 virtual servers.
• MeghRaj: This will ensure optimum utilization of the infrastructure and speed up the development and deployment of eGov applications.
• The architectural vision of GI Cloud encompasses a set of discrete cloud computing environments spread across multiple locations, built on existing or new (augmented) infrastructure, following a set of common protocols, guidelines and standards issued by the Government of India.
• NIC-CERT has been setup with the objective of creating a comprehensive framework that integrates world class security components and inbuilt threat intelligence for detection, prevention and incident response.
• Using the tools the team will correlate events that would help in generating a canvas of the attack surface and identify the vulnerabilities and possible exploits.
• NIC / DeitY has created Multi-Layer GIS Platform named “Bharat Maps” which depicts core foundation data as “NICMAPS”, an integrated base map service using 1:50,000 scale reference data from Survey of India, ISRO, FSI, RGI and so on.
• This encompass 23 layers containing administrative boundaries, transport layers such as roads & railways, forest layer, settlement locations etc., including terrain map services.
• The E-way Bill System has been introduced nation-wide for inter-State movement of goods with effect from 1st April, 2018.