Opportunities and Challenges for Enabling India Digitally

Opportunities and Challenges for Enabling India Digitally

The desire to transform the nation into a digitally empowered society, a knowledge economy via creation of an ecosystem of information technology resulted in the launching of the “Digital India” initiative by the government of India. It has been established across the world that those who seek to use the ladder of technology in their daily lives are in a position to enjoy presence in higher economic echelons accredited primarily to a phenomenal increase in efficiency, quality and quantity of the work being done. The opportunities are immense accompanied by serious challenges which can act as huge barriers for the transformational change envisioned.

A World Bank report states that a 10% increase in mobile and broadband penetration resulted in the increase of the per capita GDP by 0.81% and 1.38% respectively in most of the developing countries. Assuming Digital India being in full force, it could help increase the broadband penetration across India by 50% and mobile penetration in rural India by 30% in next 2 years, the corresponding increase in GDP could be 9% (~$180 billion). The UID platform i.e. Aadhaar card (941 million as on November 2015) would facilitate lifelong and unique identification and authentication of citizens across the country, critical in assuring efficient and equitable service delivery at anytime, anywhere and on any device. The public services shall have a direct impact on the private sector as well; the cascading of impacts shall be a win-win situation for all the citizens in the country.

 Digital India as such, in its scope and vision seeks to take the country from the present state of digitally constrained economy to that of an advanced digital economy. It might face certain obstacles during the process of implementation not related to technology and its application, but for completely different factors such as cultural and societal, aggravated by the resistance a of those who see their role and influence diminishing as the process of digitization gets underway.

Digital India initiative could help in achieving the objectives of Education for all, Information for all, Healthcare for all, Broadband for all if the government focusses on strong leadership structure, enables private participation, creates detailed implementation plan with common ‘citizen centric’ framework and robust security / privacy measures, and ensures integrated efforts from all departments. As they say “The sky is not the limit” for the benefits.