Digital India: Why won't it work in our country?

Posted by Siti R

Sunday, September 10, 2017

Hey!! I thought it was a joke..........but it made me realize that 'Yes' , my India is changing or at least trying to change. Yes, I am talking about the Digital India movement. I couldn't believe that such a movement could even be introduced in India. The biggest reason for this change in our country according to me is our Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Our Government is trying to do hundreds of things for the betterment of our country but the most important point is that are these changes even made effective at the ground level or are such things gimmicks which will just add up to the speeches of our PM in the next elections? In this article of mine, I'll talk about everything about the 'DIGITAL INDIA MOVEMENT' and why it's chances of being successful in our country is very low.

What is the Digital India Movement?

Digital India is a campaign launched by the Government of India to ensure that Government services are made available to citizens electronically by improved online infrastructure and by increasing Internet connectivity or by making the country digitally empowered in the field of technology. The initiative includes plans to connect rural areas with high-speed internet networks. Digital India consists of three core components. They are:

Development of secure and stable Digital Infrastructure
Delivering government services digitally
Universal Digital Literacy

Let's look at all the three components mentioned:

Development of secure and stable Digital Infrastructure: The phrase that looks brightest in this sentence is 'Digital Infrastructure'.(What is Digital Infrastructure?) Digital Infrastructure is simply the structure required for digitization. Servers, Routers, Mobiles, various devices are all a part of digital infrastructure. We need efficient technology to have a secure and stable Digital Infrastructure. All this sounds quite simple but doing all this is quite difficult.
Delivering government services digitally: This one is actually the most important for our Government. To deliver Government services digitally, we first need a proper system. The first step to make such a system would be to collect all the required information from every citizen of our country and upload it on a huge database.(You know the population of our country!!) With this, we even need many digital platforms over which various government services are provided. These platforms must not be fragile like the ones which are already there(You would be knowing that servers of government websites crash so frequently!!)
Universal Digital Literacy: This one is the creator of most problems. Let's forget 'Universal' from this sentence and talk about our own country first. In our country, we must first concentrate on normal literacy and then talk about Digital Literacy. Just 74% people are literate in India and that's quite low. We'll discus a lot about this in the next section.

The LOOPHOLES in our country

We talked about big things earlier but will our country be able to do so?

As we discussed that for providing Government services digitally, we need to build a big system ourselves. We can't depend upon other nations and think that they are going to build such a system for us because the data which is going to be stored in such a system should be confidential. We need Quality engineers to make a digital system for providing services and precisely engineers from the IT and computer departments. But do you know, only a handful of computer engineers, precisely 5% of them can be termed as 'capable' in our country to do such a work even when India produces a whooping 15 million engineers per year.

Our Government is talking about providing Government services digitally but during the recent floods that happened in Mumbai, did we even get 1 message about a possible flood from the BMC knowing that the meteorological department had predicted it. So, if even one such message can't be given by our Government body then how is our Government talking about providing Government services digitally.

THE SUMMARY

We discussed the loopholes in our country which would stop India from becoming Digital India. Here is the summary of all the points:

Our country doesn't have quality engineers who can make a secure and stable digital system for our country.
Our Government bodies don't know the meaning of planning and even if they plan, they can't execute it.
Our country doesn't have complete literacy. It just has 74% literate people.
A Digital System can be hacked and confidential data could be stolen.

Our beautiful country India has a huge population and instead of taking everything on the digital platform, we must first improve the existing system. We must try to make our countrymen literate ,improve our educational system and then talk about any huge digital development. I hope that now you know that why won't Digital India work in our country now.

Please comment and give your reactions!!

Thank you for reading!!