IT Industry Plans for Digital India Programme

National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM) today discussed its plan to work towards Digital India Program. On the side-lines of the ongoing two-day NASSCOM Game Developer Conference, 2014 in Pune, R Chandrashekhar, President, NASSCOM, shared key elements where the industry will work with Government of India to realize the Digital India program. The Digital India program is aimed at connecting all gram panchayats by broadband and Internet, and promote e-governance to transform India into a connected knowledge economy.  

To begin with, NASSCOM will focus on creating and leveraging IT solutions across sectors like healthcare, education and financial inclusion; and also work on creating framework for the proposed smart cities.

With technology solutions at the core of Digital India plan, there is huge opportunity for IT players to use disruptive technologies to redefine paradigms for delivery of services like health, education and financial inclusion. IT will partner with the Government/s to restructure and refocus several existing schemes and implement them in a synchronized fashion.

On the occasion, R. Chandrashekhar, President, NASSCOM said that “Digital India Program is one of the most vital decisions by the Government and is aimed at creating and delivering large-scale welfare policies. The program which aims to transform India into an IT-enabled society, ties in well with NASSCOM's own vision of 'Connect, Collaborate and Co-create', which advocates the empowerment of the Indian economy through large scale IT adoption across horizontals such as healthcare, education, agriculture and others.” He further added that “NASSCOM is already working closely with IT players to lay the basic framework in patches which can be further merged with greater Digital India plan.”

NASSCOM along with its members will be moving ahead with its aim keeping in mind two important stakeholders – Government, the enabler of technology solutions and end-user, the one consuming the solutions. Affordability, accessibility, applicability and awareness-building will be the four focus areas that NASSCOM will be considering while devising any framework.

With the expected outcome of not only bridging the digital divide but also empowering the citizens of the country, IT will play an important role in transforming the existing Public Service Delivery system, improve productivity, create jobs and induce economic activity in areas which were not digital connected.