The Centre is all set to launch an array of people-centric digital services under its ambitious ‘Digital India’ programme, a top official said.
These services include digital lockers, cloud sharing, electronic signature, WiFi hot spots and e-textbook project among others.
The details about upcoming services under ‘Digital India’ were shared by Secretary in the Department of Electronics & Information Technology (DeitY), Government of India, R S Sharma during his speech at the 18th national conference on eGovernance held at Mahatma Mandir.
Sharma said these services are broadly categorised in three different ‘vision areas’ – digital infrastructure, on-demand services and digital empowerment of people.
“To include maximum number of people into the digital space, we are focussing on building digital infrastructure, such as common service centres where people can access various eGovernance services. We will open 2.5 lakh such centres across India soon. Post offices will also be converted into such centres,” he said.
To save people from the hassles of verifying their certificates from gazetted officers while making applications, the government has come up with ‘Digital Locker’, a cloud- based file sharing service.
“Citizens can put copies of digitally verified certificates on public cloud system, called ‘Digital Lockers’.
Each private locker will store all the important documents of user, which are digitally verified by government.
“Instead of sending physical copies, users can share the link of that cloud folder having digital copies of verified certificates. In the soft launch, we aim to provide such lockers, having 1GB space each, to 1 million users soon,” he said.
Sharma said Centre would also launch a similar cloud-based service for all kinds of citizen entitlements, such as ration cards for public distribution system (PDS).
“A person living in Jharkhand should be able to buy ration from Gujarat or any other state in case he needs to relocate. We want to put all his entitlements on cloud system and link it with a central software, saving his time and energy from applying again and again.
“Thus, each and every PDS shop in India could verify his identity based on the entitlement certificates available on public cloud and give him the commodities instead of asking him to apply again,” Sharma said.
One of the main features of ‘Digital India’ programme is empowerment of citizens, which include enabling citizens to access services in their own language, said Sharma.
“We are working towards bringing digital literacy as well as accessibility of digital resources, as only 5 per cent of all the online resources are in Indian languages. To address that issue, we will develop tools and technologies to translate these resources for people like farmers. We will also launch all the e-governance services in Indian languages,” he said.
Other upcoming initiatives under ‘Digital India’ include Aadhaar-linked e-signature project for greater security of online documents, public wi-fi hotspots to be set up at major tourist destinations, wi-fi facility in all the universities at a cost of Rs 790 crore and creating a national portal for lost and found people, said Sharma.
“By March 2015, we have planned to launch a nationwide programme to convert all the school textbooks into e-books. We will also encourage private publishers to come up with digital versions of their books,” the officer said.
For the digital empowerment of citizens living in rural areas, government will soon launch an ambitious project of setting up BPOs in villages.
“We want BPOs to come up in small towns and villages, so that youth do not have to relocate to cities in search of jobs. Companies will also be benefited, as they will get cheap labour compared to cities. We will launch the project in near future,” said Sharma.
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