 "Implementing Digital India may not be a click away")
The Cabinet on Wednesday approved the blueprint for the Digital India project, which is expected to see investments in upwards of Rs1,00,000 crore over the next three to four years. While the project is being hailed by the industry as transformational, its implementation may prove to be an uphill task due to the massive inter-ministerial coordination it requires.
According to experts, the project has some new initiatives but mostly includes old ones which were delayed or stuck. The existing ones such as the national optical fibre network (NOFN) will have to be accelerated. Others which were started several years ago will have to be significantly altered to bring them in tune with the latest technologies. Some other targets under the project such as bringing the net import-export balance of electronics to zero are downright impossible to achieve.
"Making it (Digital India) a reality will not be a trivial task," said Neel Ratan, executive director of audit and consultancy firm PriceWaterhouseCoopers India. Since there will be almost 15 to 20 government ministries involved, coordination of multiple ministries will be the biggest challenge, he added.
While the Department of Electronics and Information Technology has been given the task of anchoring the project, there is a significant involvement of other ministries such as Telecom, Finance, Health, Planning, Justice and Rural Development among others. "Several projects in the past have suffered due to inter-ministerial coordination issues," added Ratan who advises the government on various e-governance projects.
On Wednesday, the Cabinet approved a blueprint for the Digital India programme, which envisages all government services be delivered electronically by 2018. It will also provide "high-speed internet as a core utility" down to the gram panchayat level and a "cradle-to-grave digital identity - unique, lifelong, online and authenticable".
The three pillars of the project will be the identity which will authenticate the user, the bank account which will facilitate the delivery of welfare payments and the mobile phone that will become the ubiquitous device to access services.
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Shree Parthasarthy, director at Deloitte India said that the vision of the project is to give a different flavour to the various e-governance projects in the country and get them unified under a single umbrella. "Previously, they were operating very rudderless," said Parthasarthy. He added the model has been nicely implemented in Gujarat and it is being emulated nationally at a much grandiose level now. "However, a project of this magnitude will have its own set of issues."
The broadband connectivity initiative - NOFN-- which was started by the previous government and already delayed by almost four years, is the backbone of the entire project. "Currently, the last mile connectivity is very limited. The broadband backbone will have to be there to make the entire project work," said Ratan of PriceWaterhouseCoopers. Several other ideas such as turning 1,50,000 post offices into multi-service centres over the next two years have been on the table since first phase of the national e-governance plan was launched, but haven't fructified as yet. Similarly, though there are over 1,00,000 common service centres currently, most of them are unviable. Instead of doubling its reach, the government should focus more on making them sustainable, added Ratan. The government will also have to deal with several regulatory as well as security issues as it envisions a completely online functioning.
A government official said that NOFN will have to be "really accelerated while many other projects will have to be redesigned." The person also agreed that Department of Electronics and IT will only do the coordination while the entire implementation has to be done by the rest of the industry. However, the official added that coordination should not be a challenge as "the top leadership is committed towards the project."