Digital India Mission 6 Years Completed
Source : PIB
Technology

What we discuss under Digital India Mission 6 Years Completed ?

1. Key Facts
2. Various Initiatives of Government under Digital India Mission
3. Internet and Broadband Penetration

Why in News ?

Prime Minister interacted with the beneficiaries of Digital India through video conference on the occasion of ‘Digital India’ completing six years since its launch.

Key Facts

• The digital India programme was launched on July 1, 2015, by the prime minister.

  

• The digital India initiative was launched with a vision to transform India into a digitally empowered society and knowledge economy.
• Digital India Mission 6 Years Completed now. 
• The need of the hour is to to bridge the gap between the system and facilities, service and service between the government and the public.
• It also means a transparent, non-discriminatory system and an attack on corruption.
• The digital India drive helps to makes the task like obtaining driving license, birth certificate, paying electricity bill, paying water bill, filing income tax return, all the processes have become very easy, very fast with the help of Digital India.
• This programme was envisaged by Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY).
• The programme has three vision areas
  • Digital infrastructure as a utility for every citizen : includes availability of high speed internet for delivery of  services to citizens; digital identity for every citizen; mobile phone and bank account enabling citizen participation in digital and financial space; shareable private space on a public cloud; and safe and secure cyber-space.
  • Governance and services on demand : Seamlessly integrated services across departments or jurisdictions,  services availability in real time from online and mobile platforms, digitally transformed services for improving ease of doing business, leveraging GIS for decision support systems and development. 
  • Digital empowerment of citizens by bridging the digital divide in the country : universal digital literacy, accessible digital resources universally, all documents/certificates to be available on cloud, availability of digital resources/services in Indian languages and portability of all entitlements through cloud.
• Digital India aims to provide
  • Broadband highways;
  • Universal access to mobile connectivity;
  • Public internet access programme;
  • e-governance: reforming government through technology;
  • e-Kranti electronic delivery of services;
  • Information for all;
  • Electronics manufacturing;
  • IT for Jobs;
  • Early harvest programmes;

Various Initiatives of Government under Digital India Mission

• Digital Life Certificate
  • Jeevan Pramaan/Digital Life Certificate (DLC) is a biometric enabled digital service for pensioners for submitting their Life Certificates digitally, which was introduced in 2015 as a Digital India initiative of Government of India.
  • In this service, all life certificates submitted manually by the pensioners are now being submitted digitally by using
    Aadhaar number.
  • These Jeevan Pramaan Centres are functioning in all the 810 Head Post Offices across the country.
• e-Governance
  • With the advent of Digital India as an apex programme, various new policy initiatives have been taken up by MeitY such as
    • eKranti, policy on adoption of open source software in e-governance systems;
    • e-mail policy;
    • Policy on use of IT resources;
    • Policy on collaborative application development by opening the source code of government applications;
    • Application development and re-engineering guidelines for cloud ready applications and e-governance competency framework.
  • Major schemes such as e-districts, common service centres and state wide area network (SWAN) have also been working in this direction.
• Online e-Sign (e-Hastakshar)
  • One of the initiatives taken under Digital India Programme is to provide non-repudiable authentication of applicant’s identity through a facility called e-Sign.
  • This facility is an online digital signature service.
  • e-Sign was formally launched in 2015.
  • It is an online electronic signature service, which can be integrated with service delivery applications via an Application Programming Interface (API) to facilitate an e-Sign user to digitally sign a document.
  • Using authentication of the Aadhaar holder through Aadhaar e-KYC service, online electronic signature service is facilitated.
  • e-Sign service facilitates instant signing of documents online by citizens in a legally acceptable form.
• National Knowledge Network
  • National Knowledge Network (NKN) was established in 2010.
  •  The objective of the NKN is to interconnect all institutions of higher learning and research with a high speed data communication network to facilitate knowledge sharing and collaborative research.
  • National Informatics Centre (NIC) is the implementing agency.
• UMANG
  • Unified Mobile Application for New-Age Governance (UMANG) has been developed and launched in 2017 as a single mobile platform to deliver major government services.
  • UMANG’s core platform is integrated with Aadhaar, DigiLocker, PayGov, Rapid Assessment System (RAS), etc.
  • Citizens can access pan-India government services from the central government, state governments, local bodies and their agencies.
  • It supports 12 Indian languages, in addition to English and has been hosted on cloud.
  • UMANG aims to bring power to the fingertips of citizens.
• Digital Locker
  • Digital Locker is a key initiative under Digital India, the Government of India’s flagship programme, aimed at transforming India into a digitally empowered society and knowledge economy.
  • Targeted at the idea of paperless governance, Digital Locker is a platform for issuance and verification of documents and certificates in a digital way, thus eliminating the use of physical documents.
  • Indian residents, who sign up for a DigiLocker account, get a dedicated cloud storage space.
  • Organisations that are registered with Digital Locker can push electronic copies of documents and certificates (e.g. driving license, school certificates) directly into citizens’ lockers.
  • Citizens can also upload scanned copies of their legacy documents in their accounts.
  • These legacy documents can be electronically signed using the eSign facility.
• PRAGATI
  • PRAGATI (Pro-Active Governance And Timely Implementation) as a part of Digital India programme, e-Governance Reforming Government through Technology, was launched in 2015.
  • This video conferencing facility brings the Secretaries to Government of India and the Chief Secretaries of the states on single platform on every fourth Wednesday of the month.
  • Prime Minister is able to discuss the issues in major projects and programmes with the concerned central and state officials directly with full information and latest visuals of the ground level situation.
  • This enables faster implementation of the central level schemes/projects, state level projects and resolution of grievances between state and central level departments.
• Sahaj
  • Sahaj was a digital initiative launched by oil marketing companies for release of LPG connection with online payment and issuance of ‘e-SV’ under the Digital India initiative and the facility is now available on pan-India basis.

Internet and Broadband Penetration

• • The number of internet subscribers (both broadband and narrow band put together) which was 636.73 million at the end of March 2019 increased to 687.63 million by the end of September 2019.
  • The number of subscribers accessing internet via wireless phones, etc., was 665.37 million at the end of September 2019 while number of wireline internet subscribers was 22.26 million.
  • The number of broadband subscribers was 563.31 million at the end of March 2019 and 661.27 million at the end of November 2019.
  • There was a net increase of 50.90 million in the internet subscribers during the period from March 2019 to  September 2019.
  • India is now the global leader in monthly data consumption, with average consumption per subscriber per month increasing 146 times from 62 MB in 2014 to 9.06 GB in 2019.
  • The cost of data has also reduced substantially, enabling affordable internet access for millions of citizens.
  • National Broadband Mission : NBM was launched in 2019 with a vision to fast-track growth of digital  communication infrastructure, bridge the digital divide, facilitate digital empowerment and inclusion, and provide affordable and universal access of broadband for all. 

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