Relevance: mains: G.S paper III: e-Commerce & G.S paper II: Governance
What is Digital India Program?
- Digital India is a program to transform India into digital empowered society and knowledge economy.
- The Digital India is transformational in nature and would ensure that Government services are available to citizens electronically.
It would also bring in public accountability through mandated delivery of government’s services electronically, a Unique ID and e – Pramaan based on authentic and standard based interoperable and integrated government applications and data basis.
- What are the achievements and status of Digital India Program ?
- Digital India in the last five years was implemented with a dedicated focus on making use of digital tools and techniques for the delivery of Paperless, Presence less and Cash-less governance in the country.
- Aadhaar enabled Digilocker is enabling paperless governance by providing public documents to citizens digitally and facilitating consent-based data sharing for availing services.
- Aadhaar enabled eSign provides ease of authentication for digital transactions and thereby, eliminates the need for physical presence.
- Aadhaar is the largest de-duplication mechanism for government schemes in the country.
- DI impact on Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) scheme alone has led to the integration of 440 schemes and saving of INR 1,41 ,677 crore.
- Digital delivery of services has been strengthened with the help of 3.47 lakh Common Services Centers (CSCs), spread across 2.3 lakh Gram Panchayats in the country that provides digital access to over 350 services especially in rural areas at an affordable cost.
- These centers have also led to empowerment of marginalized sections of the society by creating jobs for over 12 lakh people and by promoting rural entrepreneurs including women VLEs.
- CSCs have also undertaken Stree Swabhinan initiative to create awareness about menstrual health and have set up over 204 sanitary pad units.
- As per the data from Electronic Transaction Aggregation and Analysis Layer (eTAAL), the portfolio of electronic services has grown to 3,102 and an average number of electronic transactions on a daily basis till April, 2019 is around 9.5 crores.
- IndEA aims to offer One Government experience to citizens and businesses by establishing the best-in-class architectural governance processes and practices with optimal utilization of ICT infrastructure and applications.
- Digital Service Standard (DSS) has been notified, which lays down the desirable quality of digital services for an enhanced citizen experience that needs to be achieved by all government entities.
- A National Software Products Mission is planned to implement National Policy on Software Products – 2019 that inter-alia includes nurturing 10,000 technology startups in software product industry and up skilling of 1,000,000 IT professionals.
- Artificial Intelligence along with other emerging technologies is envisaged to provide solutions for the benefit of citizens in all social sectors / domains.
- National Program on AI has been designed with priority mission areas, namely Healthcare, Agriculture, Education, Smart Cities, Transportation, Cyber Security, Energy, Finance and Indian Languages.
- This program will be implemented in a hub and spoke model, wherein the proposed National Centre on Artificial Intelligence will act as the hub and Centers of Excellence (CoEs) along with Startups will act as spokes.
- CoEs will facilitate startups / industry to work on the development and deployment of AI based solutions and will also aid Research and Academic Institutions in the applied research.