The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), Government of India launched the ‘Digital India’ programme with the vision to transform India into a digitally empowered society and knowledge-based economy by ensuring digital access, digital inclusion, digital empowerment and bridging the digital divide. In summary, our mission is to ensure that the digital technologies improve the life of every citizen; expand India’s digital economy, create investment & employment opportunities and global digital technological capabilities in the country.

Digital India has dramatically reduced distance between Government and citizens significantly. Further, Digital India has also helped in delivery of substantial services directly to the beneficiary in a transparent and corruption free manner. India has become one of the pre-eminent nations of the world to use technology to transform the lives of citizens. Digital India is an umbrella programme that covers multiple projects of various Central Ministries/Departments and States/UTs. Some of the major initiatives related to public service delivery are as follows:

• Common Services Centres – CSCs are offering government and business services in digital mode in rural areas through Village Level Entrepreneurs (VLEs). Over 400 digital services are being offered by these CSCs. So far, 5.31 Lakh CSCs are functional (including urban & rural areas) across the country, out of which, 4.20 Lakh CSCs are functional at Gram Panchayat level.
• Unified Mobile Application for New-age Governance (UMANG) – for providing government services to citizen through mobile. More than 1,570 government services and over 22,000 bill payment services are made available at UMANG.
• e-District Mission Mode Project (MMP): e-District project has been implemented at district and sub-district levels of all States/UTs, benefitting all citizens by delivering various e-Services such as Certificates (Birth, Caste, Death, Income and Local Resident), Pension (Old Age, Disability and Widow), Electoral, Consumer Court, Revenue Court, Land Record and services of various departments such as Commercial Tax, Agriculture, Labour, Employment Training & Skill Development etc. Presently 4,671 e-services have been launched in 709 districts across India.
• DigiLocker: It is facilitating paperless availability of public documents. Digital Locker has more than 11.7 crore users and more than 532 crore documents are made available through DigiLocker from 2,167 issuer organisations.
• Unified Payment Interface (UPI) is the leading digital payment platform. It is integrated with 330 banks and facilitated over 586 crore monthly transactions worth over Rs 10 lakh crore has been facilitated for the month of June, 2022.
• CO-WIN - It is an open platform for management of registration, appointment scheduling & managing vaccination certificates for Covid-19. More than 203 crore vaccination doses and 110 crore registrations have been facilitated by co-win.
• MyGov – It is a citizen engagement platform that is developed to facilitate participatory governance. More than 2.48 crore users are actively using MyGov.
• MeriPehchaan – National Single Sign-on platform called MeriPehchaan has been launched in July 2022 to facilitate / provide citizens ease of access to government portals.
• MyScheme – This platform has been launched in July 2022 to facilitate citizens to avail eligibility-based services.
• Direct Benefit Transfers – 315 Schemes across 53 Ministries are offering Aadhaar enabled direct benefit transfer to citizens. So far, Rs 24.3 lakh crore has been disbursed through DBT platform.
• Diksha – Diksha is a national level educational platform that helps students and teachers to participate, contribute and leverage a common platform to achieve learning goals at scale for the country. As on 27^th July 2022, 7,633 courses are available and more than 15 crore enrolments have been done.

Some of the major digital initiatives taken by the Government for welfare of farmers are as follows:

• National Agriculture Market (e-NAM): Government of India has launched National Agriculture Market (e-NAM) Scheme with the objective of creating online transparent competitive bidding system to facilitate farmers with remunerative prices for their produce. More than 1.73 crore farmers & 2.26 lakh traders have been registered on e-NAM platform. Also, 1000 mandis of 18 States and 3 UTs have been integrated with e-NAM platform.
• M-KISAN – mKisan Portal (www.mkisan.gov.in) for sending advisories on various crop related matters to the registered farmers through SMSs. In mkisan more than 5.13 crore farmers are registered for receiving crop advisories through SMS. More than 2,462 crore mobile based advisories have been sent to farmers to assist them in their farming activities.
• One Stop Window-Farmers Portal (www.farmer.gov.in) for dissemination of information on various agricultural related matter including, seeds variety, Storage Godown, Pests and plant diseases, Best Agricultural Practices, Watershed, Mandi details etc.
• Soil Health Card – It provides soil related information to facilitate farmers in farming activities. More than 22 crore soil health cards have been printed and dispatched to farmers.
• Mobile based advisory system for agriculture & Horticulture (M4AGRI) – It is mobile based advisory system for agriculture and horticulture. It has been implemented in the North-East States namely Tripura, Mizoram, Manipur, Meghalaya, Sikkim, and Arunachal Pradesh.

The Government has taken following steps in direction of data governance for socio-economic development in the country. The brief details are as follows:

• Open Government Data – To facilitate data sharing and promote innovation over non-personal data, Open Government Data platform has been developed. More than 5.65 lakh datasets across 12,800+ catalogues are published. The platform has facilitated 93.5 lakh downloads.
• API Setu – To facilitate data exchange among the system, API Setu has been developed as a platform. The platform has more than 2100 APIs, and 1000+ user organisations.
• MeitY has prepared the draft National Data Governance Framework Policy which aims to realize the full potential of India’s digital government vision, maximize the efficiency of data-led governance & public service delivery and to catalyze data-based research and innovation. Currently the draft policy is under finalization. MeitY released the Draft National Data Governance Framework Policy on 26^th May 2022 for public consultation.

The Government has already taken necessary measures to tackle challenges with regard to data privacy and data security through administering the Information Technology (IT) Act, 2000 which has necessary provisions for data privacy and data security.

This information was given by the Minister of State for Electronics & Information Technology, Shri Rajeev Chandrasekhar in a written reply to a question in Lok Sabha today.

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RKJ/M