Digital India” is an idea whose time has come. The instant response the announcement drew from India Inc. in the form of immediate pledges to invest up to '4.5 lakh crore is reflective of how business will respond if the idea to facilitate India’s leap into the future is packaged attractively, with the PM himself leading the way. To put India truly on the information highway is an ultra-ambitious project. There will be huge challenges, but, if the idea does take off, not only would investment be coming in but also high-technology jobs, an estimated 18 lakh of them, as promised by industry.
There has been several terabytes of talk in the last couple of decades about the information superhighway, e-governance and how India is poised to make the technological leap. While private-sector IT has made phenomenal strides, the governments have taken only baby steps in e-governance. However, the advantage of late starters is they can leap to the latest technology and mobile governance (M-governance) is something India can implement if governments have the will.
The advantages deriving from transparency of digital governance has already been experienced in India with the Jan Dhan and Aadhaar schemes having helped plug subsidy leaks by 25 per cent in just LPG sales. Imagine the benefits if the entire land records of India can be digitised and all transactions made traceable. So too the PDS and several other subsidy pipelines in which leakage is eating up resources,
With nearly a billion mobile telephones in operation, India has the best possible platform on which to connect citizen and state. The constraints lie mostly in spectrum, a precious resource when it comes to connectivity whose quality is already visible in poor connections but which is also growing more expensive regarding wireless access to the Internet.
The “Digital India” project should have scope far beyond interaction on social media platforms. M-governance has to go far beyond government and its leaders just touching base with people. On how far and how quickly India will free up the flow of information and make governance wholly transparent will determine the success of the information superhighway.
What is needed most is government will, which, when allied with the initiative of private enterprise, can make this dream come alive. Challenges lie ahead in promoting the “Make in India” concept in the mobile phone sector in such manner as to convince the world it can come here to make mobile phones and operate the “Cloud”, and through it facilitate the ambitious m-governance project. Can India move on from concepts to execution?
