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1st Panel Discussion - "Achieving Digital India by 2020: Opportunities and Challenges"
Digital India is an excellent concept. The Nine Pillars of Digital India say broadband highway, universal access, public Internet access, e-Governance, e-Kranti, information for all, electronics manufacturing, IT for jobs and early harvest program needs to be achieved by 2020 or before and so one has to look at the challenges and see how it needs to be overcome by making proper strategy and monitoring it at regular intervals. These Nine Pillars of Digital India was discussed at the 1st Plenary Session for the day which was entitled – ‘Achieving Digital India by 2020: Opportunities and Challenges.’ The session was moderated by Dr Arvind Gupta, Head IT Cell – BJP and was joined in by panelists Mr. S P Kochhar, CEO, TSSC; Mr. Rajan S Mathews, DG, COAI and Mr. Srikant Balchandar, Group CFO - Bharti Airtel. Mr. Kochhar remarked that just like a house cannot be complete by simply building the pillars, the Digital India initiative cannot alone be delivered with just the nine pillars deemed necessary but it has to be in a manner that it suits the person receiving the services. Mr. Rajan said that Digitization will have to be seen as a complete transformation of the whole approach of how we do business, rather than just digitally converting manual processes. Mr. Srikant suggested that Digital India 2014-19 is the much needed tonic for the country as it can redefine it in very many ways and we will have to really make it happen.
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2nd Panel Discussion - "Creating a Digital Highway for All"
With creating Digital Highway, we can access to a shareable private space on a public cloud. All citizen entitlements shall be made available on the cloud to ensure easy access. All Government documents and certificates shall become available on the cloud platform. Individuals will not be required to produce these documents for obtaining various services. Also, portability of all entitlements for individuals would be ensured through the cloud platform. Operators are in the process of launching 4G in the country and this will help in creating digital highway in the country. Private operators are investing more than Rs 100,000 Lakh for creating digital highway in urban areas. Government also has an ambitious plan for creating digital highway for rural areas. Laying of national optical fibre network (NOFN) in all 2.5 lakh gram panchayats in the country will happen in a phased manner. The NOFN will be completed in FY 2016-17 with a total estimated cost of Rs 20,100 crore. NOFN infrastructure connectivity is planned to be supplemented by government user network (GUN) as an overlay on NOFN. The estimated cost of the project is Rs 4,900 crore as capex and Rs 2,500 crore as opex for a period of 10 years. So the focus is on providing high speed digital highway to all areas as well as all sections of the society thereby helping Indian economy to grow at a fast pace.
The 2nd Panel Discussion was based on this opportunity of ‘Creating a Digital Highway for All’ and was moderated by Mr. Pravin Prashant, Co-founder – TeleAnalysis. The key speakers in this panel were Shri Vinit Goenka, Member, Taskforce, Ministry of IT, Shipping, Highways, Govt of India; Mr. Sridhar Krish, COO, Tikona; Mr. Vishal Saxena, VP-Sales (India Digitization & Smart Cities), Cisco; Mr. Dmitry Shukov, CEO - MTS India and Mr. R. K Bahuguna, CMR-RailTel Corporation of India. Mr. Dmitry said that MTS always supports any idea regarding Digitization and it sees a great opportunity in the data services market in India. Mr. Bahuguna pointed out that wi-fi is still not a financially viable business in the country as clear funds is still not allocated yet, but once this is provided free of cost to the people, the access to broadband will be available and will make them digitally literate. Mr. Sridhar said that with the vision of Digital India before us and with just 4-5 years in hand, the fundamental aspect now is to quickly get into it and implement whatever mission we have in front of us. But for that we need to ensure if we are laying the right goals if we are to achieve the dream of a Digital India. Based on his observations, Mr. Vishal said when we are building this kind of infrastructure, for example the Digital Highway, the end objective must be very clear – which is to enable services beyond that infrastructure. The idea is not just to create optical fiber or build electronic network but the idea of how to provide services on top of it. Mr. Vinit summed up the discussion by emphasizing on the fact that in addition to lack of infrastructure, low last-mile connectivity, challenges of digital literacy, there is a still higher challenge of delivering the services or content in the local languages. Also, he also informed that the objective with which the Task Force has been built is been looked into and the gap that exists in the Shipping and the Roadways infrastructure is being tried to be bridged.
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3rd Panel Discussion - Digital/ Mobile Governance: Where are We Heading?
India will achieve GDP growth of 8 -8.5 percent in FY 2015-16. The Trinity -Jan Dhan, Aadhar and Mobile will help in implementing direct transfer benefits, be it Jan Dhan Yojana, LPG Subsidy Transfer and others. Even issuance of Payment Bank License will help in strengthening digital economy. All this is a good sign for the Indian economy. It was to discuss these developments that the next discussion was initiated, which was on Digital/Mobile Governance. In the key note address Mr. Deepak Kumar Sahu, Chief Editor-VARINDIA spoke about how Digitization is considered to be driving economies around the Globe and has a direct impact on GDP of countries because of it having greater magnitude and reach. India has emerged as one of the major players in the IT sector and has now become an IT hub for various multinationals across the Globe. Having a population of 1.25 billion+ of which 63% percent of them below 35 years of age and having more than 97crore mobile phone users and over 300 million internet connections, a great future awaits India. The digital India initiative is creating further confidence to the industry. Mr. Ashish Sanyal, Independent e-Governance & ICT4D Consultant, Former Director, DeITY moderated the 3rd session by inviting speakers Dr. Shefali S Dash, Deputy Director General, NIC; Mr. Krishnan Dharmarajan, Executive Director, Centre for Digital Financial Inclusion; Mr. Girish Trivedi, Co-Founder - Monk Consulting and Mr. Upender Jit Singh, MD – WEBEL. Mr. Sanyal mused that though the term Digital India has been coined recently, the digitization drive has swept the country almost 5-6 years back when govt. organizations have been engaged in digitizing their assets and documents for a smoother mode of working. Mr. Upender mentioned about a project called ‘Matir Katha’ that has been undertaken with the Dept. of Agriculture, Govt. of West Bengal, which is a tab-based appliance where farmers can put up details about their farm and guide the distributors in terms of relevant information. He also detailed at length on what the West Bengal govt. has been doing on the mobile governance platform. Mr. Girish pointed out that a culture change has to happen for any kind of innovation to get accelerated. The integration, adoption of different technologies will necessitate and determine the pace of change in a society like ours. Mr. Krishnan discussed that mobile being a great platform, it should not be only about adding hundred different gizmos to it but it should be used in a way which is beneficial for the destitute of the country and making the optimal use of a mobile by making them access the services. Dr. Shefali stressed on the popularity of business apps in the business world and the couple of initiatives the govt. has taken wherein NIC has been involved.
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4th Panel Discussion - "Digital Manufacturing: Are we Moving in the Right Direction?"
The 4th Panel discussion of the day was on Local Manufacturing which was moderated by Mr. Gyana Swain, Co-founder & Editor – TeleAnalysis and the panelists included Mr. Sanjay Vidyarthi, MD – iQoR; Mr. Hari Om Rai, CMD, Lava International; Mr. Dinesh Prasad, Head, Devices, Qualcomm-India & South Asia; Mr. Kapil Wadhwa, Founder & Managing Director - Champion Computers and Mr. R K Pathak, Director, TCOE. While the Government is making right noises for Make in India and the industry is also reciprocating in similar fashion, the discussion gave an insight on the sectors which are leading and the ones which are lagging still in this race. Mr. Dinesh pointed out India is a mobile first economy and that Qualcomm strongly feels that there is a whole ecosystem of talent that can get this going. He further said that the Make in India project should not be carried away with just the manufacturing side of the angle but look into broader perspectives of things and larger areas like designing of products, passive components etc. Mr. Hari said that whether it is to be called a hype, but Make In India is the need of the hour. India having a huge population needs to tackle with a big problem of unemployment and an initiative like Make in India will have the solution to it. Mr. Sanjay asserted that the big disconnect in India as far as manufacturing is concerned is the complete lack of the building blocks which are necessary to do mass scale manufacturing – there is no ecosystem in terms of the presence of SME sector who will support this initiative of building India. Mr. R K Pathak gave his support in favour of design-led manufacturing by stressing the need for building R&D capabilities, Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) and developing manufacturing standards in India. India has no contributions to the global standards and it has to come out in the open to be a part of it. Mr. Kapil said that the current duty barrier has created a gap; so one needs to first contemplate on becoming strong within the country and then going strong globally.
5th Panel Discussion - "Skill Development: Where are the Gaps and How are we Addressing?"
The last discussion of the day was on ‘Skill Development: Where Are the Gaps and How Are We Addressing’ was moderated by Mr. Pravin Prashant, Co-founder – TeleAnalysis and was attended by speakers Mr. Amit Rawat, Sr. Program Manager-EMC Academic Alliance – South Asia- EMC; Mr. Atul Bhatnagar, COO – NSDC; Col Pramod Swarup Gupta, Deputy Director – TSSC. The discussion summed up that in order to achieve the dream of a Digital India, we need people with different skill sets. Both the government and the industry needs to see the gap areas and then train people with required skill sets so that things can move at a fast pace. Mr. Atul explained that on education front, around 75% of the graduates are not employable because they don’t have specific employable skills. NSDC steps in to bridge this skill gap and give the right direction and by 2022 aims to train skills of 150 million people across 20 growth sectors. Col Pramod said that if we are to skill the huge manpower of India that has a population of 1.2 billion people, India would be a global hub. The problem in India is that between the education and the skill system, there is a vast gap. We do educate people and give them a degree but at the end of the day they are not actually job employable. Mr. Amit pointed out skill development is not something new we are talking about now. We need to first understand who our audience are when we talk about skill development – primarily it could be the students there in schools, colleges or it could be those who are already out in the market but are not skilled enough or it could also be those who are employed but need further skill development.
