Digital India expansion gets ₹14903 crore outlay

Digital India expansion gets ₹14,903 crore outlay

Subject: Schemes

Context: The Union Cabinet on August 16 approved a five-year extension and expansion of the Digital India programme, including an expansion of the Computer Emergency Response Team, India (CERT-in).

More about the news:

• Union Cabinet on Wednesday approved extension of the Digital India programme with an outlay of Rs 14,903 crore to boost digital initiatives in skilling, cyber security, high performance computing and simplifying technology for masses, among other areas.
• The five-year outlay will be starting from 2021-22 to 2025-26. Moreover, this outlay would be over the budget which has already been spent on the programme over the last two years.
• Under the programme, 6.25 lakh IT professionals will receive upskilling and re-skilling training, and 2.65 lakh employees will receive information security training.
• These funds will also be used to improve and modernize the National Knowledge Network (NKN), a high-speed broadband network that was established in 2010 to improve connectivity among educational and research institutions.
• The Unified Mobile Application for New-age Governance (UMANG) platform, which offers access to about 1,700 government services, will have 540 more services added to it,
• DigiLocker, the online repository operated by the government for official documents, will be expanded to serve Medium, Small and Micro Enterprises(MSMEs).
• The National Supercomputing Mission, which has deployed 18 supercomputers, will add nine more such machines
• Bhashini, the AI-enabled translation tool created with the support of Microsoft and OpenAI, will be rolled out in all of the 22 languages included in Schedule 8 of the Constitution. 

More about Digital India Programme:

• Digital India, a flagship programme of the government of India, aims to transform India into a digitally empowered society and knowledge economy.
• It was launched in July 2015.
• Programme Management Structure for Digital India Programme

• The programme management structure for Digital India consists of a Monitoring Committee on Digital India headed by the Prime Minister
• A Digital India Advisory Group chaired by the Minister of Communications & IT and an Apex Committee chaired by the Cabinet Secretary.
• The 9 Pillars of Digital India includes:

Some Digital India Initiatives:

• Aadhaar: Aadhaar provides 12 digit biometric and demographic based identity that is unique, lifelong, online and authenticable. Further to give statutory backing to Aadhaar ‘The Aadhaar (Targeted Delivery of Financial and Other Subsidies, Benefits and Services) Act, 2016’ was notified on 26th March 2016.
• Common Services Centres – CSCs are offering government and business services in digital mode in rural areas through Village Level Entrepreneurs (VLEs).
• DigiLocker: Digital Locker provides an ecosystem with a collection of repositories and gateways for issuers to upload the documents in the digital repositories. Digital
• Unified Mobile Application for New-age Governance (UMANG) – for providing government services to citizen through mobile..
• e-Sign: e-Sign service facilitates instant signing of forms/documents online by citizens in a legally acceptable form.
• MyGov – It is a citizen engagement platform that is developed to facilitate participatory governance.
• MeriPehchaan – National Single Sign-on (NSSO) platform called MeriPehchaan has been launched in July 2022 to facilitate / provide citizens ease of access to government portals.
• Digital Village: MeitY has also initiated the ’Digital Village Pilot Project” in October, 2018. 700 Gram Panchayats (GPs)/Village with atleast one Gram Panchayat/Village per District per State/UT are being covered under the project. The digital services being offered are Digital Health Services, Education Service, Financial Services, Skill Development, Solar panel powered street lights including Government to Citizens Services (G2C), Business to Citizen (B2C) Services.
• National Rollout of eDistrict MMP: e-District is a Mission Mode Project (MMP) that aims at electronic delivery of identified high volume citizen centric services at the district or sub-district level.