Digital India Policy by Government to spread its wings in Villages through new Digital Village initiative

New Delhi, Dec 20, 2016: Government's Digital India policy will soon see a boost with a new programme known as Digital Village. This initiative will provide services like health and education in villages with the help of technology.

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This programme aims to cover 100 villages at its initial stage after which it will spread further, Law and IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said today. In an event Prasad said "We are going to unleash another important initiative- Digital Village. As per my understanding, it will be a collector-driven initiative. We propose to begin with 100 villages and expand it later."

Collector in collaboration with local bodies may select a village to provide health, education and other virtual world service through Wi-Fi connectivity. The minister also appealed to the officers for pro-actively supporting government's digital initiative aimed at transforming the country, mentioned PTI.

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"We have trained 18 lakh people over a span of four days. We may scale it (digital payments training) up in January," he said.

Government has set a target of training 1.25 crore people on digital payments by March 31, 2017. Appreciating National Informatics Centre, Minister of State for Law and IT P P Chaudhary said that there are about 8,000 websites carrying information about government work and facilitating transactions.

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"I would like to suggest some of the areas where we have to perform. We are far behind in the generation of Intellectual Property. In the area of cyber security, we have to be pro-active and not only be reactive," Chaudhary said.

This is the first time Indians are having access to the government without intermediaries, said IT secretary Aruna Sundararajan. At the event, e-governance service of departments from Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat, Punjab and Jharkhand won Digital India awards, earlier known as Web Ratna Awards.

Rajasthan won platinum award in the state category while Tamil Nadu received Gold and Haryana silver award for e-governance services. North Goa won platinum award in districts category. Kupwara received Gold and Udham Singh Nagar bagged silver award for e-governance. Municipal Corporations of Surat, Greater Visakhapatnam, Madurai and UP's e-NagarSewaUP bagged award.

– prepared by Saptaparni Goon of NewsGram. Twitter: @saptaparni_goon