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Digital India is an ambitious scheme of government of India. This scheme was flagged off on 2nd July 2015 and that specific week was celebrated as digital India week (Government of India, 2015). This scheme aims to literate all the citizens and to digitize the entire government run programme for transparency and ease of governance. It is believed that digital India will lead to promising e-governance. With the passage of time, e-governance will be transformed into m-governance and will facilitate the citizens to access the variety of government schemes with the help of mobile phones using high speed connections such as that of 4G (Singh & Chaubey, 2016; Goverment of India, 2018). Due to the usage of 4G, residents will be able to enjoy rich features offered by this technology (Singh & Chaubey, 2016).
In order to ensure its effective and speedy implementation, government has provisioned enough fund and laid down the milestones. It is estimated that government of India would spend around Rs. 1.13 trillion by 2019 (Ghosh, 2014). This investment will also generate the job at the tune of 17 million direct and 85 million indirect. With the digital India, government is also aiming to manufacture the electronics product at home itself (Ghosh, 2014). Consequently, import of information technology product will decline substantially.
Governing council of village in India is termed as ‘Panchayat’. Enough funds are also allocated to ensure that the digital drive reaches to the ‘Panchayats’. For the inclusion of farmers, ‘e-Kranti’ has been introduced. In ‘e-Kranti’ variety of digital services that includes education, hospital, justice, security, financial inclusion etc. will be rendered to the farmers (Ghosh, 2014).
Digital India is considered as significant due to the large population of India’s. According to 2011’s census, India has already crossed the mark of one billion and mark of 1.3 billion is touched at the end of 2017 (WorldMeters, 2017). Equally alarming, population growth trend is continued to rise. Meeting the need of such a large population with manual system requires huge amount of resources. At the same time, manual system is time consuming and ineffective, since, one has to travel several times up-to the intended office and wait in a queue for a longer time in order to get his turn. With digital India, one can access the intended services at the ease of home. Government will be equally benefited, since it does not need to provision the additional resources and expenditure.
Many countries across the world have already adopted the digital technology and highly relying on their digital data (Jones, et al., 2009; Chen & Wellman, 2004). Countries already adopted the digitization are enjoying high degree of efficiency and transparency in their functioning. Significance of the digital technology and its growth story can be determined with the fact that world’s top 7 companies (based on stock price) that includes Microsoft, iPhone, Facebook etc. are based on digital technology. Planned smart cities are going to highly rely on digital technology. Indian government has also declared to develop at least 40 cities across the country as Smart city. Correspondingly, all these cities will have high usage of information technology in security, water management, electricity etc. (Lombardi et al., 2012; Lee & Park, 2005).
In order to ensure comprehensive coverage and strong monitoring, digital India is divided into nine pillars. Each of them has been reproduced here:
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Broadband highways;
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Universal access to mobile connectivity;
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Public Internet access programme;
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E-governance - reforming government through technology;
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‘e-Kranti’ electronic delivery of services;
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Information for all;
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Electronics Manufacturing;
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IT for jobs;
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Early harvest programmes.