Azadi Ka Digital Mahotsav, the week-long program was inaugurated on 29th November 2021 by Shri Rajeev Chandrasekhar, Hon’ble Minister of State for Skill Development, Entrepreneurship and Electronics & IT in presence of dignitaries with each day dedicated to one goal adopted by MeitY.
At the 1st session on first day of Azadi Ka Amrit Mahotsav, presentations were made regarding Public Digital Platforms initiatives for enabling Good Governance. Shri Abhishek Singh, President & CEO-NeGD, made an introductory presentation on Public Digital Platforms using the principles of India Enterprise Architecture (IndEA) and how it can integrate with various online projects for enabling a connected government experience.
The presentation was followed by remarks from Shri Ajay Sawhney, Secretary, MeitY who underlined the necessity to bridge the gap between e-governance project silos and their converge while suitably involving and connecting with both public and private ecosystem actors.
Shri Kunal Kumar, Joint Secretary & Mission Director (Smart Cities Mission), Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs made a presentation in Indian Urban Data Exchange (IUDX) platform, developed in association with the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore and supported by individual startups and government agencies. Calling it a consortium of public private partnership, he said the IUDX was an open source, secure, cloud based, multilayered data exchange platform which has the potential to function as a National Data Exchange.
Shri Rajeev Chawla, Additional Secretary, e-Governance, Karnataka made a presentation on Farmer Registration & Unified Beneficiary Information System (FRUITS), while sharing insights about available farmer data in Karnataka and how it is making it easy for the farmers to access and the administration to enable government services.
Shri Santosh Sarangi, Additional Secretary, Dept of School Education & Literacy spoke on National Digital Education Architecture (NDEAR) program and DIKSHA learning platform as he recalled PM’s vision to boost digital architecture for education and skilling in India.
Dr. Vijay Kumar, Commissioner and Secretary, Planning, briefed the audience regarding Meghalaya Enterprise Architecture (MeghEA). Under the programme, MyMeg citizen dashboard is envisaged. MeghEA has already enabled process reengineering to reduce the turn around time for file-based sanctions and approvals thus saving 120 man years.
Public digital platforms for good governance, developed by NIC were presented by Shri D.C Misra, Deputy Director General, NIC. Sharing glimpses of NIC initiatives, he revisited the pioneering initiatives like eOffice, GST prime, eHospital, Service Plus, Sandes, PM-Kisan, eCourts, eSampark, eTaal etc which have been instrumental in ushering good governance and productivity.
The last speaker for the session was Dr. Vivek Raghavan, Chief Evangelist, EkStep Foundation who enlightened the audience on the National Language Translation Mission which may transcend the language barriers using the power of Digitalisation and empower people to access the internet in their own language; thus taking huge strides towards Digital Inclusion for an Atmanirbhar Bharat.
The session of Public Digital Platforms for Good Governance concluded with the closing remarks from Shri Ajay Sawhney, Secretary, MeitY as he expressed his optimism of making India the world leader in Digital Governance.
RKJ/M