The Next Step In Digital India – Digital Village + GVMC Bags Award

The Central Government will soon launch a Digital Village programme in India with the help of technology, as a part of the Digital India initiative. The programme will help provide services like health and education in 100 villages in its pilot stage. The collector-driven initiative will be expanded to other parts of India at a later stage.

With the help of local bodies, a collector can select a village to provide services such as WiFi service and basic services like health and education. Officers were appealed at Digital India Awards to join the initiative in a pro-active manner. The initiative that is aimed at transforming the country has managed to train 18 lakh people in a span of four days during the event.

Government has set the target of training 1.25 crore people by the end of March, 2017 on digital payments. The National Informatics Centre was appreciated at the event for the existence of 8000 websites that carry information of the work the government does and for facilitating transactions. The areas that were suggested to be worked on were, the concept of intellectual property and cyber security. It was suggested that it was better to be pro-active than be reactive.

Aruna Sundararajan, IT Secretary, pointed out that it was a first for India where the citizens had access to the government without intermediaries. The e-governance services of Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Jharkhand and Gujarat won awards at the event that was previously known as Web Ratna Awards. The GVMC also bagged an award along with the municipal corporations of Surat and Madhurai.