World keen to learn from India’s digital story, says Ravi Shankar Prasad

IT and Electronics Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said that Digital India journey has evinced global interest and people are eager to learn from Indian experience. He said has said that National Informatics Centre (NIC) has responsibility to deploy technology for improving governance and make growth more inclusive and sustainable. He was speaking at the inauguration of VIVID 2019.

He said, “The Digital India initiative should be seen beyond IT and governance. It is an initiative of the Modi government aimed at empowering ordinary people. NIC has the responsibility to make people use digital technology with the objective of bridging rural-urban gaps and also ensuring that the national efforts to bring about transparency in governance are reached.”

Prasad stated that NIC should work towards use of technology for improving Indian agriculture scene, standardise primary education by equipping government schools with technological tools, health care with low cost technology.

He said that India has everything to be the hub centre of data analytics and NIC has the pivotal position to take India to a position of dominance in this sector. Another issue of immediate concern is development of low cost cyber security solutions. He said the government’s technology custodian should not hesitate in extending supporting hand to private sector.

On the occasion, he released following:

• Digital India Compendium
• Digidhan Mitra Chatbot
• Technology incubation and development of entrepreneurs 2.0 scheme
• Centre of Excellence on: IOT Open lab, STPI Bengaluru: ESDM Incubation, STPI Bhubaneswar; Emerging Technologies, NASSCOM, Gandhinagar; Emerging Technologies, NASSCOM, Vishakapatnam.

The CoE on IoT Open Lab at Bangalore intends to support 100 start-ups per year with an overall target to support 500 start-ups over a period of five years. The Electronics System Design and Manufacturing (ESDM) Incubator at Bhubaneswar with state-of-art facilities aims to promote ESDM innovation, R&D and create Indian intellectual property. It is the first of its kind in the Eastern Region of the country. The incubator will be implemented by STPI in collaboration with Government of Odisha, IIIT Bhubaneswar and IESA. It aims to leverage 40 start-ups over period of five years.

The CoE for IoT and AI at IIT Gandhinagar is said to add momentum to the deep tech innovation ecosystem and has the major focus areas of manufacturing (Industry 4.0), biotech, pharma and healthcare. Whereas, the CoE for IoT at Vizag in partnership with NASSCOM and Government of Andhra Pradesh will focus on technology intervention for bringing positive change in agriculture, healthcare and Industry 4.0.

Digidhan Mitra Chatbot
Designed and developed by NIC, the AI-based Digidhan Mitra enables a text and voice based conversation with the user, mining the Digidhan portal, to give customised information in graphical, tabular and textual format. It provides bank wise transactions details as well as growth pattern of various modes of transactions like BHIM, IMPS, Cards, etc in tabular as well as graphical form.

TIDE 2.0 Scheme
The scheme has been devised to promote the momentum into the tech entrepreneurship landscape. The scheme provides financial and technical support to incubators engaged in supporting ICT start-ups using emerging technologies such as IoT, AI, blockchain, robotics, etc in seven pre-identified areas of societal relevance.

NIC TechGov Awards
NIC TechGov is a competitive platform that presents a unique opportunity to the NIC officers posted in states and districts offices across the nation to accelerate their knowledge and learn emerging technologies. Total 203 teams cumulatively consisting of 514 members registered for the event under two different tracks called Innovation and Collab:DEV. Across different sub-tracks of TechGov 2019, seven teams comprising 13 members and eight teams with 19 members in total were declared winners in Gold and Silver categories respectively.