Rajeev Chandrasekhar Updated Rajya Sabha on Digital India Milestones

Government has launched the Digital India programme with the vision of transforming India into a digitally empowered society and a knowledge-based economy, by ensuring digital access, digital inclusion, digital empowerment and bridging the digital divide. The programme is centred on three key vision areas, namely digital infrastructure as a core utility to every citizen, governance and services on demand, and digital empowerment of citizens. The overall goal is to ensure that digital technologies improve the life of every citizen, expand India’s digital economy, and creating investment and employment opportunities and create digital technological capabilities in India.

Digital India has considerably reduced the distance between Government and citizens. It has also helped in delivery of substantial services directly to the beneficiary in a transparent and corruption free manner. In the process, India has emerged as one of the pre-eminent nations of the world to use technology to transform the lives of its citizens.

This information was given by the Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology, Shri Rajeev Chandrasekhar in a written reply to a question in Rajya Sabha.

Digital India is an umbrella programme that covers multiple projects of various Central Ministries/Departments and States and Union Territories (UTs). The status of some of the key initiatives undertaken under the programme across the country, including in Rajasthan, are at Annex-I.

The Government had launched the India BPO Promotion Scheme (IBPS) andthe North East BPO Promotion Scheme (NEBPS) under the Digital India programme, with the aim of creating employment opportunities and dispersal of the Information Technology and Information Technology Enabled Services (ITES) industry in small cities and towns by incentivising the setting up of Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) and ITES operations by providing financial support of up to ₹ 1 lakh per seat in the form of viability gap funding towards capital and operational expenditures. Under IBPS and NEBPS, 246 BPO/ITES units have started operations covering 27 States/UTs and are providing direct employment to over 51,584 persons. State-wise details of BPO/ITES units setup and direct employment generated are placed at Annex-II.

ANNEX-I

The present status of some of the key initiatives undertaken by MeitY under Digital India programme across the country is as follows:

• 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 26^th March 2016. Over 135.5 crore residents have been enrolled.
• Common Services Centres – CSCs are offering government and business services in digital mode in rural areas through Village Level Entrepreneurs (VLEs). Over 400 digital services are being offered by these CSCs. So far, 5.21 Lakh CSCs are functional (including urban & rural areas) across the country, out of which, 4.14 Lakh CSCs are functional at Gram Panchayat level. There are 23,035 CSCs are functional in the State of Rajasthan, out of which 18823 CSCs are functional at the Gram Panchayat level.
• DigiLocker: Digital Locker provides an ecosystem with collection of repositories and gateways for issuers to upload the documents in the digital repositories. Digital Locker has more than 13.7 crore users and more than 562 crore documents are made available through DigiLocker from 2,311 issuer organisations.
• Unified Mobile Application for New-age Governance (UMANG) – for providing government services to citizen through mobile. More than 1668 e-Services and over 20,197 bill payment services are made available at UMANG.

• e-Sign: e-Sign service facilitates instant signing of forms/documents online by citizens in a legally acceptable form. The services are being leveraged by various applications using OTP based authentication services of UIDAI. More than 31.08 crore e-Sign issued by all agencies wherein, 7.01 Crore e-Sign issued by CDAC.
• MyGov – It is a citizen engagement platform that is developed to facilitate participatory governance. Presently, over 2.76+ crore users are registered with MyGov, participating in various activities hosted on MyGov platform.
• 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. Total 4419 services of various Ministries/States integrated with NSSO.
• 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. Presently 4,671 e-services have been launched in 709 districts across India.

• Open Government Data Platform– To facilitate data sharing and promote innovation over non-personal data, Open Government Data platform has been developed. More than 5.93 lakh datasets across 12,940+ catalogues are published. The platform has facilitated 94.8 lakh downloads.
• eHospital/ Online Registration System (ORS): e-Hospital application is the Hospital Management Information System for internal workflows and processes of hospitals. Currently, 753 Hospitals have been on-boarded on e-Hospital and ORS has been adopted by 557 hospitals across the country with over 68 lakh appointments booked from ORS.

• CO-WIN - It is an open platform for management of registration, appointment scheduling & managing vaccination certificates for Covid-19. It has registered 110 crore persons and has facilitated administration of 220 crore doses of vaccinations.
• Jeevan Pramaan: Jeevan Pramaan envisages to digitize the whole process of securing the life certificate for Pensioner. With this initiative, the pensioner is no more required to physically present himself or herself in front of disbursing agency or the certification authority. Over 685.42lakh Digital Life certificates have been processed since 2014.
• NCOG-GIS Applications: National Centre of Geo-informatics (NCoG) project, is a GIS platform developed for sharing, collaboration, location based analytics and decision support system for Departments. So far, 659 applications across various domains are operational.

• National Knowledge Network: A high speed data communication network has been established to interconnect Institution of higher learning, and research. So far, 1752 links to Institutions have been commissioned and made operational. 522 NKN links have been connected to NIC district centers across India.
• Pradhan Mantri Gramin Digital Saksharta Abhiyaan (PMGDISHA): The Government has approved a new scheme titled “Pradhan Mantri Gramin Digital Saksharta Abhiyan (PMGDISHA)” to usher in digital literacy in rural India by covering 6 Crore rural households (one person per household). It has 6.63 crore registered candidates and out of this, 5.69 crore candidates have been trained and 4.22 crore have been certified.
• Unified Payment Interface (UPI) is the leading digital payment platform. It has onboarded 376 banks and has facilitated 730 crore transactions (by volume) worth Rs 11.9 lakh crore.

• FutureSkills Prime: MeitY in collaboration with NASSCOM has initiated a programme titled FutureSkills PRIME. The programme is aimed at re-skilling/ up-skilling of IT professionals in 10 new/emerging technologies which include Augmented/Virtual Reality, Internet of Things, Big Data Analytics, Artificial Intelligence, Robotic Process Automation, Additive Manufacturing/ 3D Printing, Cloud Computing, Social & Mobile, Cyber Security and Blockchain.
• Cyber Security: The Government has taken necessary measures to tackle challenges with regard to data privacy and data security through administering the Information Technology (IT) Act, 2000 which has necessary provisions for data privacy and data security. India has made it to the top 10 in Global Cyber security Index (GCI) 2020 launched by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) on June 29, 2021, moving up 37 places to rank as the tenth best country in the world on key cyber safety parameters.
• Electronics Manufacturing

• Modified Special Incentive Package (M-SIPS): As on date, 315 applications with proposed investment of approximately Rs. 85,632 crore have been approved.
• Electronic Manufacturing Clusters (EMC): Under EMC scheme, 19 Greenfield EMCs and3 Common Facility Centres (CFCs) measuring an area of 3,464 acres with project cost ofRs. 3,732 crore including Government Grant-in-aid of Rs. 1,529 crore have been approved in 15 states across the country. Based on closure of receipt of applications under EMC scheme, MeitY notified Modified Electronics Manufacturing Clusters (EMC 2.0) Scheme on 1^st April, 2020 for further strengthening the infrastructure base for electronics industry in the country and deepening the electronics value chain.

ANNEX-II

State-wise details of unites set up and direct employment generated under BPO Schemes (IBPS & NEBPS):