NEW DELHI: The Digital India project that aims to offer a one-stop shop for government services would use the mobile phone as the backbone of its delivery mechanism. The government hopes the Rs 1.13-lakh crore initiative that seeks to transform India into a connected economy to also attract investment in electronics manufacturing, create millions of jobs and support trade.In an interview with ET, telecom minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi wants to ensure a smartphone in the hands of every citizen by 2019. Currently, nearly 74% of the population has mobile phones, most of which though is in the hands of urban India.“We want to ensure that all the services can be provided through a mobile handset, especially, health, education, various government services and retail,” Prasad said. “We want it (handset) to be used as a tool for empowerment. We will need to incentivise its usage in order to promote the social and the economic objectives of the government.”In order to use the mobile phone to help achieve financial inclusion, the government will need to structure the delivery of financial services in a manner that encourages a villager to go for mobile banking, the minister said. For instance, the Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana, a financial inclusion plan the Prime Minister announced on August 15, can be effectively rolled out through mobile handsets. The programme seeks to give every household in rural India access to bank account, along with a RuPay debit card and insurance cover of Rs 1 lakh. At present, nearly 60% of the nation’s population doesn’t have access to financial services.Digital India promises to transform India into a connected knowledge economy offering world-class services at the click of a mouse and will be implemented in a phased manner, according to information released by the government last week.Plans to digitally connect the entire country will be supported by 20- and 40-hour modules on digital literacy in regional languages, which the government plans to run over the next few years. “During a presentation, the PM remarked IT+IT equals IT. This means India Today plus Information Technology (through Digital India) will yield India Tomorrow,” said Prasad.The government feels that open access to “broadband highways” across cities, towns and villages would give a fillip to trade across the country. “The other important benefit we see is surge in e-commerce. If we can bring broadband to the remotest corners of the country it will give rise to trade and warehousing,” Prasad said.Supporting the initiatives will be 6-7 manufacturing clusters for electronic goods which have been approved to be set up in Jharkhand, Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh for products such as mobile handsets, microchip and chip-less designs and set-top boxes, he said.





The intention is to bring down net electronics imports to zero by 2020, from about $100 billion now, a move which will help the country control its current-account deficit. As things stand, net annual electronics imports could rise to $400 billion by 2020, outgrowing oil imports.“The PM is absolutely focused on making India the manufacturing hub and we see massive potential in electronic manufacturing,” Prasad said.Modi had listed Digital India and local manufacturing as among the top priorities for the new BJP-led government during his Independence Day speech on August 15.In his Budget for this fiscal year through March 2015, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley had introduced a slew of measures to boost electronics manufacturing, such as a basic customs duty of 10% on telecommunication products outside the purview of the Information Technology Agreement and investment-linked deduction for semi-conductor wafer fab units.Prasad said the government is working towards establishing the first manufacturing cluster by March next year.According to the minister, the programme has already generated huge interest nationally and internationally. “We are holding a conference with the IT ministers of various states on August 26,” to decide on the modalities of how to implement the project as state participation will be key, he said.Referring to his meetings with global corporate honchos, Prasad said companies such as American network equipment maker Cisco Systems wanted to access benefits of cluster manufacturing.“Facebook has also expressed interest in partnering with the government in delivering governance programmes such as e-education,” he said, referring to his meeting with the US social media company’s chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg, two months ago.Prasad though admitted that the main backbone of Digital India — National Optic Fibre Network (NOFN) venture — had seen virtually “no progress” for the past three years. He said given the current focus on Digital India, which is being monitored by the Prime Minister himself, NOFN will meet all its deadlines henceforth.To suggestions that the private sector may be roped in for the NOFN project to speed it up, Prasad said the government will continue to implement it through state-run public sector units Bharat Sanchar Nigam, Power Grid Corporation and RailTel.As reported earlier by ET, common service centres in villages will serve as critical pivots around which most goods and services will be delivered. Once connected to broadband, an entire village’s requirements of goods can be placed through these centres and people can use these facilities as one-stop shop for all their e-needs, said a senior official at the telecom department.