MODI`S DIGITAL INDIA PLAN.

MODI`S DIGITAL INDIA PLAN.

Narendra Modi has initiated his Digital India project to connect India digitally with a planned allocation of Rs one lakh crore. The plan is to establish a digital platform to digitally connect and deliver government programs and services to individuals across India, thereby harnessing the power of information technology.


The project also plans to connect all villages through high speed internet by 2019. The plan is ambitious to say the least, though it is not truly original.

The Congress led UPA, had initiated the National e-governance program that also sought to digitally connect India and a lot of work has already gone into it. Modi plans to build on that and to ensure that it is implemented within stated time lines. The difference this time is that while the project under UPA did not get the priority and attention it deserved, Modi is giving it his personal signature and will be monitoring the project implementation on a priority basis. A Digital India Advisory Group is to be set up under the Ministry of Communications and IT and will be chaired by the Cabinet Secretary, thereby ensuring close monitoring by the PMO.

The Plan

Modi wants India on the cloud. What that means is that every individual’s personal record is stored in a virtual central repository or Digital Locker, which can be accessed by government officials anywhere anytime, through established protocols. For example, an individual’s certificates from school or college, birth certificates, medical records etc are all stored in the individual’s folder and these can be accessed by any government official to confirm or verify the individual’s claims without the need for the individual to present the hard copy. The purpose is to free the individual from the need to physically present the hard copy for verification in any government office. This will save a lot of time for the individual and the government officials, as also reduce the opportunity for bribes being demanded.

The government has invited suggestions from the technical talent pool in India to submit suggestions through the site MyGov.in, on how to develop the communication protocol or the applications programing interface (API) for delivering this project.
The plan is to create a digital platform to serve nine verticals; e-governance, e-Kranti, public internet access program, broadband highway, information access for all, mobile connectivity, early harvest programs, IT for jobs, and electronic manufacturing.
The government plans to extend the project to the Clean India campaign as also, the Skills and Entrepreneurship project for job creation. The government will realign the National Informatics Centre to assist in integrating the above with delivering projects of various ministries, through direct or PPP mode.


The Challenges:
Infrastructure





India will need massive Data Centres with mirroring i.e. all data will need to be backed up at an alternate site. This will require large investment to set up state-of-the-art data centres in various parts of India. These data centres will have to be provided fail proof physical and cyber security cover.
Security


Security is not an act but a process and a lifestyle. India is a nation where we neither understand security nor practice it, as part of our daily lifestyle. This has left our IT infrastructure vulnerable to security attack either through cyber space or through internal sabotage. While organizations like Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) is trying to cope with the ever evolving cyber threats, India is still nowhere in establishing secure and impenetrable networks, as seen in various attacks on our critical sites of various government establishments, over the years. Government sites especially are vulnerable.


Then there is the real possibility of internal sabotage that can result in stealing or damaging of data, at any given point. There is a real possibility of a disgruntled individual who is motivated by greed, revenge, political or religious affiliation, may get access to the data to steal or damage it.
The problem is that security has to be clearly understood by all and unless this is made part of our operational lifestyle, both at the individual and at the government level, securing vast and critical data, will always be a major hurdle. The biggest challenge to the success of the Digital India project is not on the delivery side but on the security side. Securing this data for all time is going to be the real challenge that the government has to address before embarking on this ambitious project.





Social networking site Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg said he is excited about Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Digital India programme and will discuss with him ways to connect the country's masses with the digital world.

"I am meeting with Prime Minister Modi tomorrow (Friday). I am really excited about his Digital India campaign. We will be trying to work together for spreading the internet to the one billion Indians who are out of reach of the internet," Zuckerberg told reporters on the sidelines of the Facebook summit organised here.

"Facebook on its own cannot spread internet accessibility. We require to work together with everyone, including the government and telecom operators to do so," he added.

Zuckerberg, who is on his first visit to India, said he looks forward to Facebook helping the government in the Digital India programme.

"I know that Prime Minister Modi is also committed to spreading the internet. He is committed to connecting villages online and we are excited to see how Facebook can help," he said.


Cyber Laws


When the government stores personal data of the citizens, the government becomes its custodian. This means that the government is responsible for securing the data and also preventing its misuse. The question is how is the government going to prevent litigation in cases of data misuse? For instance, what happens when one individual uses a government official to access another individual’s medical records and then uses this information against that individual? Furthermore, India is a country with a VIP culture. What happens in a case of data pertaining to a VIP being accessed, lost or damaged by someone with vested interest?
In this scenario, the government becomes a party to the data breach. What happens if the data is damaged or the delay in verification causes the individual a financial loss or a loss of business opportunity? Will the government be liable for the loss? Do we have cyber laws that adequately address such scenarios? These will have to be looked at very closely by the government prior to launching the Digital India program.

Training

The Digital India program will have to simultaneously launch a training program to ensure all government officials understand the data that is available, its protocols of access and protocols of security, and also the legal ramifications of data breach. Given the large size of the government, it will take time and investment to train and cover all individuals, for successful delivery of the program.

Suggested extension of the program

The Digital India program is a great opportunity to develop the digital backbone in the country. If the government can extend the vision to include email. Messaging and cloud services on servers located in India, it will truly usher in a digital revolution in India, besides opening up massive business opportunities at home.
Today, most Indians hold email accounts with Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo etc along with using messaging services like WhatsApp and Viber, which all run on servers located outside India. This makes all individuals and by extension, the country, vulnerable to surveillance and privacy breach, as shown by snooping done by NSA, of the United States.
India must offer all the above services including cloud storage, to all Indians. Of course, this will entail massive investment in technology and infrastructure, but the Digital India program could well be extended in a phased manner to initiate the process of bringing all digital activity to India.

India has seen the UIDAI project being implemented pretty successfully and therefore there is no reason why the Modi led administration will not succeed in implementing this program by the targeted date of 2019. At least the political will is there.

Rs 1 lakh crore for Narendra Modi’s Digital India plan :

New Delhi: The government on Wednesday approved an umbrella programme Digital India comprising various projects worth about Rs 1 lakh crore to transform the country into a digitally empowered knowledge economy.
The programme includes projects that aim to ensure that government services are available to citizens electronically and people get benefit of the latest information and communication technology.
“This is a follow up to the key decisions taken on the design of the programme during the meeting of the Prime Minister on Digital India Programme on August 7, 2014, and to sensitise all ministries to this vast programme touching every corner of the government,” Telecom minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said after a Cabinet meeting.
The programme will be implemented in phases from the current year till 2018. The government also gave nod to increasing royalty rates on minerals including iron ore and bauxite, a long-awaited move that will significantly swell the annual revenue of states.
“Cabinet in-principle approved revision of mineral royalty. There are 55 such items but this excludes coal, lignite and sand for stowing,” communications and IT minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said after the Cabinet meeting.
“We are satisfied that revision has been done. It has not been revised for a long time,” he said, without disclosing the impact of the move in financial terms. As per some estimates, annual revenue collection of mineral-bearing states could swell over 40 per cent to around Rs 15,000 crore.
Social networking site Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg Thursday said he is excited about Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Digital India programme and will discuss with him ways to connect the country's masses with the digital world.

"I am meeting with Prime Minister Modi tomorrow (Friday). I am really excited about his Digital India campaign. We will be trying to work together for spreading the internet to the one billion Indians who are out of reach of the Internet," Zuckerberg told reporters on the sidelines of the Facebook summit organised here.




"Facebook on its own cannot spread Internet accessibility. We require to work together with everyone, including the government and telecom operators to do so," he added.

Zuckerberg, who is on his first visit to India, said he looks forward to Facebook helping the government in the Digital India programme.

"I know that Prime Minister Modi is also committed to spreading the Internet. He is committed to connecting villages online and we are excited to see how Facebook can help," he said.

India has about 243 million Internet users and 100 million plus Facebook users, he added.

Zuckerberg said that he will be informing Modi about the Facebook initiative - 'internet.org' - which aims to make Internet access affordable for people across the globe.

Focused on enabling access to the next five billion people still without Internet, the founding members of the project include Facebook, Ericsson, Nokia, Opera, Qualcomm and Samsung. The partners are collaborating on developing lower cost, higher quality smartphones and enlarging Internet access in poorly served communities.

The initiative has succeeded in connecting 3 million people to the Internet.