PM to kick off 'Digital India' project today at 4 pm: Digital Lockers, village connectivity key focus

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s pet project ‘Digital India’ is all set to be launched today. The week-long mega event, called ‘‘Digital India Week’ – which is expected to attract 10,000 people – will be be flagged off at the Indira Gandhi stadium, New Delhi. The who’s who of the industry like Reliance Industries chairman Mukesh Ambani, Tata Group chairman Cyrus Mistry, Bharti Group chairman Sunil Mittal, Wipro chairman Azim Premji, and Adani Group chairman Gautam Adani are expected to attend the event. [caption id=“attachment_2321426” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Digital India[/caption] Digital India is an umbrella programme of the government comprising various projects worth about Rs 1 lakh crore to transform the country into a digitally empowered and knowledge economy. Under the Digital India programme, initiatives on Digital Locker, e-education and e-health are expected to be announced during the event. The ‘Digital India Week,’ is likely to see commitments of “billions of dollars” of investments by foreign and domestic firms, IT minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said. The Digital India week will see announcements on several projects that have already launched or ready to be launched: – The Digital India programme aims to provide Broadband Highways, Universal Access to Mobile Connectivity,  Public Internet Access Programme,  E-Governance: Reforming Government through Technology, eKranti - Electronic Delivery of Services, Information for All, Electronics Manufacturing: Target Net Zero Imports,  IT for Jobs  and Early Harvest Programmes. Several projects/products have already launched or ready to be launched as indicated below: – There will be Digital Lockers System that aims to minimise the usage of physical documents and enable sharing of e-documents across agencies. The sharing of the e-documents will be done through registered repositories thereby ensuring the authenticity of the documents online. – MyGov.in has been implemented as a platform for citizen engagement in governance, through a “Discuss”, “Do” and “Disseminate” approach. The mobile App for MyGov would bring these features to users on a mobile phone. – Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM) Mobile app would be used by people and Government organisations for achieving the goals of Swachh Bharat Mission. – eSign framework would allow citizens to digitally sign a document online using Aadhaar authentication. – The Online Registration System (ORS) under the e-hospital application has been introduced. This application provides important services such as online registration, payment of fees and appointment, online diagnostic reports, enquiring availability of blood online etc. – National Scholarships Portal is a one stop solution for end to end scholarship process right from submission of student application, verification, sanction and disbursal to end beneficiary for all the scholarships provided by the Government of India. – DeitY has undertaken an initiative namely Digitize India Platform (DIP) for large scale digitization of records in the country that would facilitate efficient delivery of services to the citizens. – The Government of India has undertaken an initiative namely Bharat Net – a high speed digital highway to connect all 2.5 lakh Gram Panchayats of country. This would be the world’s largest rural broadband connectivity project using optical fibre. – BSNL has introduced Next Generation Network (NGN), to replace 30 year old exchanges, which is an IP based technology to manage all types of services like voice, data, multimedia/ video and other types of packet switched communication services. – BSNL has undertaken large scale deployment of Wi-Fi hotspots throughout the country. The user can latch on the BSNL Wi-Fi network through their mobile devices. Policy initiatives have also been undertaken by DeitY in the e- Governance domain like e-Kranti Framework, Policy on Adoption of Open Source Software for Government of India, Framework for Adoption of Open Source Software in e-Governance Systems, Policy on Open Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for Government of India, E-mail Policy of Government of India, Policy on Use of IT Resources of Government of India, Policy on Collaborative Application Development by Opening the Source Code of Government Applications, Application Development & Re-Engineering Guidelines for Cloud Ready Applications.