Pradhan Mantri Digital Gram Yojana

Digital Gram (डिजिटल ग्राम)

By joining hands with the Central Government, the State government has initiated the scheme of Digital Gram on the lines of "Digital India". Under this scheme, almost all the villages of every district were declared as a digital village. The village panchayats of every district will be put on the national optic fiber network, which would make the districts completely digital. Khandala, Khasala, Vihirgaon, Dabha, and Tarodi are the first five villages, which are declared as "Digital Gram". Even though these villages are belonging to various revenue blocks, each village is provided with.

• 4 MBPS internet service
• Video conferencing service
• Primary health center
• Wi-Fi internet service at school
• Wi-Fi internet services for all villagers

As a form of revolution, the entire concept behind this initiative is to locate villages on "Digital Highway". The purpose of this digital highway technology is to bring several services that will let everyone develop newer system befitting the agro-industry. This digital revolution will empower farmers to promote their products anywhere across the country in addition to empowering youth to avail employment oriented skills. Even, experts will also be able to lead Gram Panchayats all across the state in a concurrent manner. Moreover, the state will also be contemplated to develop e-library simultaneously.

Digital Panchayat:

In India, there are nearly 6, 35,000 villages that are represented by more than 250,000 Panchayats and 3,00,000 Panchayat functionaries. In these constituencies, there is no such governance system for development and sharing information to reach its maximum citizens. But, 99% of these Panchayats are found without ICT connected world of information and knowledge.

To address these issues, DEF is actively engaged in disseminating information along with empowering rural as well as grassroots level communities by means of using the power of digital media and ICT tools. Therefore, it is essential to tap panchayats and furnish with internet tools and ICT for the purpose of creating an identity and virtual presence.

The Vision Areas of Digital Gram:

. Convenient Infrastructure To Every Citizen:

• As the core utility, high-speed internet will be made available in every Gram Panchayats
• Support for serious digital identity – online, unique, lifelong, and authenticable
• Bank account and mobile phone will let participation in economic and digital space at an individual level
• A hassle-free access to any Common Service center in their locality
• Safe and protected Cyber-space made available in the country
• Private space, which is shareable in the public cloud

2. Demandable Governance And Services:

• In order to offer an easy and single window access to every person, departments and jurisdictions are seamlessly integrated
• Access government services online using any mobile platform in real time
• Assure an easy access to all citizen entitlements, which are available in the Cloud
• To improve every business with much ease and comfort, government services are digitally transformed
• Making threshold, cashless, and electronic financial transactions
• Leverage GIS to make decision support systems

3. Digital Empowerment of Citizens:

• Worldwide access to all digital resources
• Universal digital literacy
• All government documents and certificates made available on the cloud
• Collaborative digital platform to get participative governance
• Availability of digital services and resources in Indian languages
• Portability of every entitlement for individuals via the cloud

The scope of Digital Gram:

The general scope of this program will be:

• Being transformative to realize Indian Talent and Information Technology for getting India Tomorrow
• To prepare India for obtaining knowledgeable future
• Making technology easily accessible by everyone
• The Digital Gram program will pull a number of existing schemes to streamline, refocus, and even implement in a harmonized manner.

Digital Gram intends to offer the much required thrust so as to develop the nine pillars, which are as follows:

• IT for jobs
• Electronics Manufacturing
• Early harvest programs
• Information for all
• Public internet access program
• Broadband highways
• E-Governance – Refosrm government with the help of technology
• Universal access to the mobile connectivity
• e-Kranti – delivery of services electronically

At Present, the platform of Digital Panchayat improves and facilitates everyday functioning of panchayats via two-way flow of content and information. With the help of Panchayat websites, information regarding decisions, which are made at gram sabha meetings, will get recorded and shared. This will enhance transparency because bureaucrats and higher level officials could not able to change decisions. For a minimum of 90 days, Digital Panchayats also host the fellowship. Under this initiative, people can able to work and travel with a number of panchayats available at the district level so as to make elected members literate digitally, collection information from the panchayats and in turn, post it online.

Under the project of Digital Panchayat, around 500 Panchayats have been enabled digitally with devoted online presence. For this reason, Digital Panchayat centers are established all across the states to help panchayats go online. With NIELIT affiliation, digital panchayat centers offer training to the panchayat members as almost all the Digital Panchayat centers are enabled with Wi-Fi facility. So, workshops and training related to digital panchayat have been organized in each and every state. Nearly 5,000 members of gram Panchayat have been made literate digitally. At 500 Panchayats, more than 100 digital fellows are deployed to work with the Panchayat functionaries and even help them in using digital and ITC tools.