The digital future of our country is distinctly being re-imagined

Source: Livemint

Relevance: Impact of Digital India

Synopsis: The Digital India mission has made a positive impact on India’s socio-economic development in past few decades. It also led to transformation of lives and livelihoods that at the grassroot levels.

Platformization is the key

At the core of India’s transformation into Digital India is India’s ‘platformization’ story. That is how the country has built one of the world’s most robust and comprehensive digital public-good platforms as the foundation of Digital India.

• A digital public-good platform creates enormous value by enabling seamless transactions, promoting innovation and generating efficiency and transparency for users.
• India’s 20-plus public digital platforms have successfully built scale across multiple citizen services and also helped create a vibrant tech startup ecosystem that is making good use of this digital infrastructure.
• The rise of public digital platforms also represents a productive engagement between the government and Indian industry to work together in tackling crucial socio-economic challenges.

Examples of various digital platforms

• Use of UPI (unified payment interface) for making payments
• Booking a vaccination slot using Cowin platform
• Aadhaar ecosystem has attained 1.3 billion registrations and how a unique identity has become the foundation for digital transformation across sectors
• FastTag, which became mandatory earlier this year and enables online toll collection, has already facilitated 192 million transactions
• Umang app, which offers a one-stop platform for multiple government services, has witnessed a cumulative 1.7 billion transactions
• MyGov Chatbot as India’s response to the covid crisis
• eSanjeevani, which has so far enabled 9 million telemedicine consultations
• The upcoming National Digital Health Mission: Universal Health Initiative, for example, can also be a game-changer for healthcare services in the country.

Potential of digitisation 

From enabling farmers to sell their produce through e-commerce platforms, to facilitating education and healthcare in the remotest parts of our nation, digitalization offers enormous transformative opportunities for India.

• Open digital ecosystems today have the potential to unlock opportunities worth $700 billion for India by 2030, as per a report by BCG.
• The environmental, societal and governance (ECG) impact across sectors like healthcare, talent, urban governance, agriculture, law and justice, education and micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) can create new value of $500 billion-plus, and over $200 billion in savings for the country.

Reasons behind success of Digital India

• Affordability through low-cost development
• Interoperability with an API-driven backend
• Mobile-first suitability even for the country’s non-smartphone segment
• Multi-lingual interfaces to increase access to common people
• Leveraging of offline infrastructure of Common Service Centres in remote areas

Conclusion

India has made a tremendous leap to become a robust digital economy, and the future of our country will be defined by how well we can integrate digital solutions across platforms. We must strive towards developing a seamless, transparent, and inclusive digital ecosystem that is driven by India’s world-class innovation capabilities.

Terms to know

• National Digital Health Mission