Rajiv Bhalla,
Director Sales, Intel South - Asia
Information technology has been one of the key driving forces in fuelling India’s growth; it has transformed India’s image on the global platform. To ensure that there is increased technology consumption across the country – in urban and rural areas alike, the government of India is focusing on using technology to fuel the growth in India.
Intel has been working with various government agencies for the past decade to drive the need for technology across verticals starting with education, which is a stepping stone to a digitally empowered person. In 2012, Intel along with The National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM) had launched the National Digital Literacy Mission (NDLM) in bringing together several players from the ecosystem on the same platform to work towards a common goal of accelerating digital literacy in India in order to help realize the government’s vision of having at least 1 e-literate person in every household by the year 2020. NDLM is also seen as an effort to complement the objectives of the National Optic Fibre Network (NOFN) to delivering high speed broadband to villages of India, to enable a digitally rich ecosystem.
One of the key challenges that remains to this day is the lack of basic infrastructure in the smaller towns and cities. There is a huge gap that divides the rural-urban infrastructure, starting with roads to power to telecommunications. While the smartphone has been able to penetrate deep into the country, the availability of standard mobile internet is still a problem. With the government planning to e-most facilities, at least some form of engagement/ avail can be accessed through the smartphone, and without access to regular mobile internet, this could be seen as a bottleneck.
The route to digitization is to educate the user on the how technology can be customized to fulfil their education, personal, and professional needs.
