Digital connectivity is a great
leveler. Cutting across demographic and socio-economic segments, Indians are
increasingly connecting and communicating with each other through mobile phones
and computers riding on digital networks. The Digital India programme itself
promises to transform India into a digitally empowered society by focusing on
digital literacy, digital resources, and collaborative digital platforms. This
also places emphasis on universal digital literacy and availability of digital
resources/services in Indian languages.
Universal Digital Literacy
Digital literacy assumes paramount
importance at an individual level for truly and fully leveraging the potential
the Digital India programme. It provides the citizens the ability to fully
exploit the digital technologies to empower themselves. It helps them seek
better livelihood opportunities and become economically secure.
The focus is on making at
least one person e-literate in every household. Core ICT infrastructure set up
by the central and state governments, such as CSCs, can play a critical role in
taking digital literacy to the remotest locations of the country. To ensure
that all panchayats in the country have high-speed connectivity, the Department
of Telecom (DoT) has established Bharat Broadband Network Ltd. (BBNL) to roll
out the National Optical Fiber Network (NOFN). BBNL will lay out the optic
fiber cable terminating in each of the 2,50,000 gram panchayats in the country,
providing 100 Mbps link to be used as information highway by all the
stakeholders to ensure that digital inclusion reaches all villages across the
country. This will ensure digitization and connectivity of the local
institutions, such as panchayat office, schools, health centres, libraries,
etc. The industry has also come forward to support the e-literacy goal through
the National Digital Literacy Mission.
National Institute of Electronics
and Information Technology (NIELIT), an autonomous society under DeitY, has
identified more than 5000 facilitation centres across the country for training
on courses which will equip a person to undertake e-Governance transactions
through computers and other basic activities, like e-mail, browsing the
internet, etc. NIELIT has also signed MoUs with industry partners towards jointly
conducting courses and online examinations on digital literacy.
Universally accessible digital resources
Digital resources can be termed as universally accessible when they are easily available everywhere
and by everyone besides being user friendly. Open resources have certain advantages over the commercially available digital resources. First and formost among the advantages is that they are widely available and are inexpensive. They can be used widely and amenable for customization. Digital
resources created or implemented along these lines can be accessed by everyone compared to resources developed from proprietary systems where licensing restriction would come into play. Respective departments and
agencies should ensure that the digital resources thus developed are
of high quality standards so that they are easyly accessible and customizable.
The National Data
Sharing and Accessibility Policy (NDSAP) requires government organizations to proactively
release their datasets in an open format. Implementation of NDSAP in India is
being done by NIC, an agency of DeitY, through the Open Government Platform for
India (http://data.gov.in) which provides a
single point access to all the open-format datasets published by different
government departments. DeitY is also formulating a policy on open APIs to make
all the data and information provided by government organizations open and machine
readable, which can then be consumed by other e-governance applications/
systems and the public. DeitY is responsible for setting up the API standards
and designing a gateway for seamless sharing of information amongst the various
government agencies.
Digital resources must be validated for different operating systems, diverse devices such as mobile phones, tablets, phablets, desktop computers and laptop computers etc. and varied browsers. These devices,
while all able to access sites where digital resources are available, may be based
on varying support standards and also may or may not support differentiated
styles of content presentation and layout. In such cases, the content may not
be rendered correctly on all devices. therefore, it is necessary that all the content is verified and validated for browser compatibility. Conformance to DeitY-notified standards
for government data and application of the necessary style sheets and other
server side solutions can help owner departments and agencies achieve this
aspect of universal accessibility of their digital resources.
Under the Digital
India programme, the government is also committed to providing access to
digital resources for citizens with special needs. To illustrate some of the special needs would be those with visual or
hearing impairments (which may be partial or complete), learning or cognitive
disabilities, physical disabilities which hinder operation of ubiquitous access
devices such as phones, tablets and computers.Universally Accesible Digital Resources:
Current Scenario:
Government documents are not easily accessible
Changed Scenario:
- Citizen related documents would be available electronically
- Government departments may access the documents issued by other government agencies
- Documents issued to the citizen would be available to them anywhere and anytime in a standard form which can be shared with an authorized agency.
- The documents will be available in local languages
- Documents can be accessed by the citizen through web portals and mobile apps.
All documents/certificates to be available on
cloud
Today, citizens are asked by different department to
provide government documents or certificates, which are already available with
some department/institution of the government, in physical form. This does not provide the one face of the Government and Governance is seen in bad light costing the State precious goodwill. Portability of
all electronic documents should be ensured. As an example, educational
institutions should ensure that all their degrees and certificates are
digitized and kept in online repositories with appropriate access protocols.
The citizen, while filling some application form, should not be asked to submit
the certified copies of his/her educational certificates but should provide
details of these certificates available in an online repository which can be
seen by the agency concerned using the pointer provided by the citizen. All
these repositories of all government issued documents/certificates should be
hosted on a cloud platform to provide a single source of authentication for these
documents/certificates. The data may include categories such as digitally
signed educational certificates, land records, driving licenses, permits, etc.
Requesting departments or users may be provided authenticated access to the
digital repository available over the cloud.
Availability of digital resources/ services in
Indian languages
India has a
remarkable diversity in terms of languages written and spoken in different
parts of the country. There are 22 official languages and 12 scripts. Knowledge
of English is limited to a very small section of the population in the country.
The rest often cannot access or comprehend digital resources which are available
mainly in English.
DeitY has initiated
the Technology Development for Indian Languages (TDIL) programme for developing
information processing tools and techniques to facilitate human-machine
interaction without language barriers, creating and accessing multilingual
knowledge resources, and integrating them to develop innovative user products
and services. The programme also promotes language technology standardization
through active participation in international and national standardization
bodies such as ISO, UNICODE, World-wide-Web consortium (W3C) and Bureau of
Indian Standards (BIS) to ensure adequate representation of Indian languages in
existing and future language technology standards.
DeitY has also
initiated the Localization Projects Management Framework (LPMF) to help
localize applications under the MMPs and other government applications. DeitY
is also formulating a new mission mode project named as e-Bhasha to help
develop and disseminate digital content in local languages to India's largely
non-English speaking population. The differntly abled friendly content and systems are
being developed as per accessibility standards.
Collaborative digital platforms for
participative governance
Traditionally, electronic media was used for dissemination of
information and provision of services to the users. Through these platforms,
Government could establish communication with the citizens though it was mostly
one-way which is called broadcasting. The new age digital platforms can now facilitate government
departments to have effective two-way communication and interaction with
citizens. with the new technology, it is now possible to have the citizen participate in a dialogue and voice his/her concerns. Platforms that are more collaborative facilitate greater
participation from the users. Instead of reaching out to citizens every now and
then, government can be in touch with them always through digital
platforms which would facilitate participative governance.
The platform would provide a mechanism to discuss various issues to
arrive at innovative solutions, make suggestions to the government, provide
feedback on governance, rate the government actions/policies/initiatives, and
actively participate with the government to achieve the desired outcomes.
DeitY has recently launched a nationwide digital platform named as “myGov”
(www.mygov.in) to facilitate
collaborative and participative governance. DeitY also maintains a social media
page highlighting e-governance services being provided through NeGP at https://www.facebook.com/NationaleGovernancePlan which has lakhs of fans and followers.
