Ravi Shankar Prasad, the Union minister for communication and information technology, said he expected Digital India to be a $1 trillion economy in the next five to seven years.
Prasad was speaking at the launch of LG's K7 and K10 smartphones here. With this, LG joins the long list of foreign companies to participate in the government's ambitious 'Make in India' initiative. The newly launched devices will be manufactured at the company's plant in Noida. He said to ensure the progress of programmes such as Digital India and Startup India from ground zero, the government has five initiatives to strengthen digital infrastructure.
The first step involves connecting 250,000 gram panchayat clusters through an optical fibre network, actually started in 2011-12.
Prasad said, "When our government came into power, the total optical fibre laid down was only 327 km and the total optical piping was 2,200 km. In less than two years, we have laid down nearly 135,000 km of optical pipes and 115,000 km of optical fibre."
He added once all the clusters are covered, the facility of optical Wi-Fi will further take it other villages, including inaccessible areas.
The second step involves a recently-cleared policy called virtual mobile network, where one need not have their own infrastructure. One can purchase own bulk talking time from spectrum of others and then outsource franchisee-like services across the country, including rural internet facilities.
Common service centres forms the crux of the third step. He said, "Today, nearly 157,000 such centres are operational in the country, a lot of which are even run by co-operatives of women. These provide digital services, insurance and banking facilities, digital literacy and much more."
"When we took charge, the numbers stood at 83,000 and we decided to scale it up by another 100,000," he remarked.
The fourth step involves the digitisation of the 155,000-odd post offices in the country, which primarily includes incorporation of core-banking solutions - banking from anywhere to anywhere with a click of a button. According to Prasad, when his government came, only 230 post offices had this facility, which has now increased to 21,000 and by May, the government expects to cover nearly 25,000. It also plans to give solar-powered handheld devices to 130,000 rural POs, to facilitate e-education, insurance, postal delivery and third-party services.
"By March next year, we are going to start a payments bank of the postal department. About 60 Indian and global consortiums are willing to partner India Post for third-party services. This includes major lenders such as the World Bank, Deutsche Bank, Citibank, Barclays, Templeton," he remarked.
The last step is the revving up of business processing outsourcing centres in tier-III and tier-IV cities. The government plans to provide incentives to the rural population to create more employment opportunities, since the digital system in these areas will heavily rely on these.
