The government is trying to push Indian digital economy to USD 1 trillion in the next 5-7 years and also two consultant firms are working on its roadmap, said, union minister for IT and electronics and law and justice, Ravi Shankar Prasad while addressing an ASSOCHAM 2nd International Technology Summit 2017.
All this is happening because Indians have passion for technology. India has emerged as the 3rd biggest startup movement in the world and the best young brains are now creating jobs through start-ups.
The number of mobile phones added in India over the last 2.5 years equals the population of Italy or France. Of the targeted 2.5 lakh gram panchayats are to be connected via optical fibre under the national optical fibre network programme, now called ‘BharatNet’, around 1 lakh has already been connected.
He said, “When our government came to power in May 2014, only 358 km of optical fibres had been laid. In the last three years, we laid 2, 10,000 km and linked 1,00,000 gram panchayats with it by the end of this year.”
In three years about 105 mobile manufacturing factories have come in India and India is becoming a big hub of electronics and mobile manufacturing. 32 have come in Noida and Greater Noida said the minister.
The union minister also said that there have been three phases of growth of India’s IT industry, whereby in phase one Indian IT companies became the ‘good outsouce in the world’ while in phase two international giants like Amazon, Facebook, Whatsapp others came to India considering it a huge market.
The third phase is that of India’s domestic IT initiative, startup movement which is growing very fast with 3-4 startups are coming up every day, said Mr Prasad.
“We have to find middle path. On middle path, I have always said that data availability, data utility, data anonymity, data privacy — on these four principle if we proceed then surely India will robust framework,” he concluded.
-By Abid Hasan
