Digital India –Empowering Citizens

In the current global scenario, strongly believing in Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam (the whole world is one family) can usher the country into a new world of wisdom and knowledge where digital forces can help to bridge the gap between the elderly western world and the young eastern world of the future.

The growth of a country depends on the socioeconomic growth of its citizens. In today’s scenario, digital inclusion is the starting point for empowerment. While the digital technologies pervade day-to-day life of urban Indians, the rural India is still digitally illiterate. The rural India has a significant role to play in the growth of the country as it is home to 70% of our population. Almost 75% of new factories in India in the last decade were built in rural areas.

Technology, media and telecom can help to reach the 6 lakh villages of India and address the problems of lack of infrastructure, qualified and trained professionals, lack of awareness through mobile and IT platforms. Going forward, we should not only concentrate on educating the children and women, but also focus on skill development and knowledge management for the youth of tomorrow.

The Digital India initiative which promises to transform India by connecting every part of the country with a high speed knowledge network and offering world class services to the citizens is a critical step for empowering people.

Digitizing Governance

Efficient governance is a necessary step for empowering citizens in a country. Governance requires an open platform through which the government can reach the citizens easily and efficiently. Digitizing the government services will help in reaching more number of people in a vast geography like India. The e-Governance project depends upon the success of broadband highway and mobile penetration.

My Gov and PM India, unique platforms for crowdsourcing inputs from grassroots to formulate policies, are great examples of participatory governance. Government will further use data analytics for processing ideas generated by various e-governance portals and meaningfully use it for better governance.

Digitally Green Agriculture

India has been known as a land of agriculture for ages. The agriculture sector has been the mainstay of Indian economy contributing about 15% to the GDP in 2013-14. There will be 9 billion people that will need to be fed on earth by 2050. To feed this rapidly-expanding population in the coming years, agriculture must produce more. ICT tools should be utilized for accelerating the growth of agricultural sector which will in turn boost the economic growth of the country. The productivity of farmers is low because of lack of knowledge about new technologies and government initiatives.

Social media can be helpful for connecting farmers all over the country and connecting buyers with sellers directly removing the middleman. Recently farmers in Maharashtra have found an unusual ally in Facebook. They formed a group on social media and started inviting farmers from across the region to join the group to meet the supply-demand gap. M2M can help in optimizing productivity through appropriate usage of fertilizers, pesticides, and other farm resources based on real-time weather conditions, soil property, etc.

Technologies like Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and Global Positioning System (GPS) along with a wide range of sensors, monitors and controllers for agricultural equipment enable farmers to use electronic guidance aids to direct equipment movements more accurately, provide precise positioning for all equipment actions and chemical applications and analyse this data in association with other sources of data (agronomic, climatic, etc.). Precision farming helps in yield monitoring, yield mapping, variable rate fertilizer, weed and salinity mapping and variable spraying.

Commerce to e-Commerce

Constituting about 10% of its GDP, India’s retail sector is emerging as one of the most dynamic and profitable sectors. The e-Commerce market is slowly replacing the traditional brick and mortar sellers in India. The increase in mobile and smart device penetration, the access to internet and entry of numerous online retailers with exciting discount and payment options are the key drivers for e-retail growth in India. With the emergence of non-banking players in the payments industry, the e-commerce market is also growing at a rapid pace. Indian e-commerce majorly depends upon Cash-on-Delivery option of payment as 50% of all online transactions are done in this mode. The entry of many online retailers in the market has taken the competition to a different level. The e-retailers have joined the traditional mall operators and brick-and-mortar retailers to skim the market by providing heavy discounts and attractive offers like exclusive merchandise, cash back schemes and promotional offers during the festive seasons.

Source: Deloitte-Confederation of Indian Industry (online)

The author of this artcle is Assistant Professor, Pioneer Institute of Professional Studies, Indore