The Financial Express | Published: Aug 23 2014, 02:37 IST
The Digital India programme cleared by the cabinet on Wednesday seeks to ‘prepare India for a knowledge future’. On the face of it, the plan looks like a pipe dream but in reality, it is not. It has three key objectives.
First, to create a digital infrastructure for providing to citizens services like digital identity, mobile phone and a bank account.
Second, to service and govern a real-time online financial transaction platform.
And third, to digitize all documents and records of the citizens and make them available on a real-time basis.
So, what makes all this achievable now? To begin with, creating the telecom infrastructure, critical to the R1.13 lakh crore plan, is a work in progress—a large part of it has already been put in place by the telecom companies. What the government has to do, and this is the real challenge as it requires defence vacating spectrum, is to make available additional spectrum to cater to a nation-wide digital platform. The R30,000 crore
National Optic Fibre Network plan for connecting 2.5 lakh gram panchayats across the country to provide community wi-fi service, though languishing, needs to be expedited. For Digital India, digital identity needs to work as the common thread for all services.
This is where Aadhaar will be of immense help. About 66 crore people are already enrolled for Aadhaar and with the PM pressing for a quick, 100% enrollment, digital identity for all is just a matter of time.
The biggest advantage is that several states, on their own, have either created or are in the process of creating Digital-India-type infrastructure. Madhya Pradesh initiated the Samagra scheme in 2012 for transferring all entitlements like scholarship or pension and providing public services, even updating of birth, death and marriage records, online. The registration of people under Samagra is almost complete and Aadhaar is currently being seeded with the beneficiary data.
Similarly, Rajasthan has also started the Aadhaar-based Bhamashah scheme on August 15 for transferring all entitlements to the bank accounts of beneficiaries electronically. What the Centre needs to do is coordinate with the states and ride on the work that has already been done or is being done by them for connecting people and governance electronically.