Narendra Modi Flags Digital India Campaign with Digital India Week

‘Make in India’ is an initiative that was started back in September 2014 by the Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi. The principal objective of this initiative is to build manufacturing firms within India to generate more job opportunities and improve the skills of the people of India across different sectors like automobile, aviation, biotechnology, defence manufacturing, mining, oil and gas, ports, railways, textile and much more. As a part of the ‘Make in India’ campaign, Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, has launched the ‘Digital India Week’ today. He says the campaign is a part of a grander plan in the future and hopes to give better services with the use of IT.

Narendra Modi has been named as the chairman of the Digital India Week, where he also unveiled the official logo of the campaign that seeks to transform India into a digital powerhouse. For this campaign, Digital India will provide broadband connectivity to all panchayats, Wi-fi in all the schools and universities and public wi-fi hotspots in all important cities by 2019. It will be extended for giving services in areas like health, education, agriculture and banking. The vision is focused on three important areas:

• Digital infrastructure as a utility to every citizen
• Governance and service on Demand
• Digital empowerment of Citizens

The event saw tech powerhouses like Reliance Industries, Tata Group, Wipro, Bharti Group, etc. investing crores on the Digital India Programme.

Officials say a plan will also be announced for “billions of dollars” of investment, most likely in manufacturing—critical for a government that needs to create more jobs, at a faster rate.

India’s first cyber prime minister, Modi has used social media and particularly Twitter, where he has 13 million followers, to fashion himself as a leader in handling technology.

With a growing economy and declining handset prices, India is one of the fastest developing smartphone markets in the world, and Modi is looking to harness India’s potential for social development in fields like education and health.

For now, many companies are in support of the Make in India campaign. Companies from China like Alibaba and Xiaomi showed their full backing for the project. Alibaba Chairman said, “We are excited about India. We are excited about Make in India and Digital India.” Xiaomi President Lin Bin too showed his support and stated, “We have some big plans for India. We fully support Make in India.”

Many companies have started putting up production houses in India like Celkon, Foxconn, Mercedes-Benz, etc.

This initiative looks very promising. This can improve the economic well-being of Indian masses.

Let us see how the campaign shapes up in the future.

You can also follow Make in India YouTube campaign here.