Cabinet Greenlights Digital India Programme Expansion With Rs 14,903 Crore Funding

The Cabinet, chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, on Wednesday (16 August) approved the expansion of the Digital India programme with a total outlay of Rs 14,903 crore.

Digital India was launched on 1 July 2015 to enable digital delivery of services to citizens.

It was conceived with the vision of transforming India into a digitally empowered society and a knowledge-based economy, by ensuring digital access, inclusion, and empowerment, and bridging the digital divide.

Now, the expanded Digital India programme will build upon the progress made in the previous version of the scheme.

"Today’s announcement will give a boost to the digital economy of India, drive digital access to services and support India’s IT and electronics ecosystem," a Cabinet note said.

Key features, at a glance

As part of the expanded project, 6.25 lakh IT professionals will be reskilled and upskilled under the FutureSkills Prime Programme.

Plus, information security training will be given to 2.65 lakh persons under the Information Security & Education Awareness (ISEA) Phase Programme.

The UMANG platform — Unified Mobile Application for New-age Governance — will host 540 additional services.

UMANG provides a single platform for citizens to access pan-India e-governance services across the range, from central to local government bodies. It's a vehicle for mobile governance in India.

Further, under the expanded Digital India programme, nine additional supercomputers will be added under the National Supercomputing Mission (NCM).

A total of 18 supercomputers have already been deployed under the NCM.

The NCM was set up to provide the country with supercomputing infrastructure to meet the increasing computational needs of the academia, researchers, micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs), and startups through indigenous capabilities.

The National Knowledge Network, which connects 1,787 educational institutions, will be modernised under the expanded Digital India.

Digital document verification facility under DigiLocker will be made available to MSMEs and other organisations.

As many as 1,200 startups from the tier 2 and 3 cities will be supported.

Three centres of excellence in artificial intelligence on health, agriculture, and sustainable cities will be set up.

Cyber awareness courses will be made available for 12 crore college students.

Further, new initiatives in cyber security, including the development of tools as well as integration of more than 200 sites with the National Cyber Coordination Centre, will be taken.

Notably, Bhashini, the AI-enabled multi-language translation tool, will be rolled out in all of the 22 major languages. Currently, it supports 10 languages.

Read: Bhashini: How India Is Using AI To Build The Internet For Local Languages