Digital India: Decoding the Myths

28 Jun 2017
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This month, I had a distinct pleasure to speak at Bareilly, “New India: Opportunities and Challenges”, an event organized by Jagran Group and Future College. I was asked to talk about Digital India and Make In India. Perhaps the 2 initiatives that have governed the development of India over the last 2 years. Key focus of both these initiatives being to make it easy to begin, sustain and grow businesses in India.

While preparing and thinking about how to put it across to a Tier2 audience which may not otherwise be that savvy or care about development at the top level, here is a simplistic picture that I came up with. Digital India is about the following:

Connectivity: Connecting it all. Laying the backbone of infrastructure to enable everyone to be connected both from a voice and a data perspective. While this is already a success, there is huge scope for how to put applications together for its usage. There is huge scope in healthcare, education and agriculture.

- Transactional: The best mechanism to remove corruption is reduce the manual intervention. This is also a reasonable success so far.

Financial: With the Aadhaar linkings, mobile wallets and digital currency, we are slowly but surely getting there.

Communication: This is where the challenge lies. The challenge is not in how to leverage it, the challenge is in the misuse of it. Digital is quickly becoming the tool for the corrupt and the devious. You can read more about it: Keyboard is Mightier Than the Pen is Mightier Than the Sword – Cyber Terrorism.

We also had a conversation about the obstacles that will inhibit leveraging these initiatives:

- India is not one: There is a rural India and there is urban India. There is a secular India and there is a communal India. There is an equal for all India and there is a divided by caste, religion, gender India. We look at initiatives with a broad brush and that becomes a major issue. The initiatives need to be much more local.

- Meritocracy versus reservation: The answer is a balance, rather delicate.

A commonly asked question is whether Digital India or Make In India are successful?! In reality, the progress of initiatives and its success is usually a matter of perception, based on personal experiences. At a true level, such initiatives take at least 4-5 years for true impact to come across as a broad visible social change. Till then, statistics is the best means a manipulator can get.