To commemorate five years of the Digital India Programme, an online conference “Digital Bharat Aatmanirbhar Bharat” has been organised on 1st July 2020 by the Ministry of Electronics & IT.  The conference highlighted Digital India’s 5 year journey so far and new initiatives and focus areas were discussed by stalwarts of Digital India programme. 

Hon’ble Minister of Law & Justice, Communications and Electronics & Information Technology, Shri Ravi Shankar Prasad in his inaugural address emphasized the need for the development of good mobile apps across various sectors making Aatmanirbhar Bharat.

The conference witnessed sessions by stalwarts of Digital India Programme including Shri  J Satyanarayana, Former IAS, Chief Advisor, Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution in India(WEF),  Dr. R S Sharma, Former IAS & Chairman, TRAI, Shri Nandan Nilekani, Non-Executive Chairman, Infosys, Shri Rajeev Chawla, Additional Chief Secretary,  e-Governance, Karnataka, Smt. S Radha Chauhan, Additional Chief Secretary, Technical Education, Uttar Pradesh, Shri Prakash Kumar Former IAS & CEO, GSTN, Shri Gulshan Rai, Former National Cyber Security Coordinator, PMO, Shri Santosh Mishra, CEO-TNeGA & Commissioner of e-Governance, Tamil Nadu, Smt.  Praveena Rai, COO, NPCI, Smt. Debjani Ghosh, President, NASSCOM, Dr. Rajendra Kumar,  Additional Secretary, MeitY, Shri Saurabh Gaur IAS, Joint Secretary, MeitY, Shri Abhishek Singh, President & CEO, NeGD, Dr. Rajeev Sangal, IIIT Hyderabad.

Shri Ajay Sawhney, Secretary, MeitY elaborated on the need to accelerate the implementation of National Public Digital Platforms in sectors like Health, Education, Agriculture, Criminal Justice and Logistics. 

Dr. Neeta Verma, Director General, NIC  explained the importance of Cloud-enabled eGov Applications while speaking at Conference and elaborated the Cloud infrastructure managed by NIC across its Data Centres.  Dr. Verma stressed upon the need of enabling more and more applications on Cloud technology. Migration of existing eGov applications to Cloud may require re-development in certain cases to enable them to leverage upon the scaling benefits whenever required. 

In the first half of the conference, the Digital platform revolution that has driven the digital transformation across the country under the Digital India Programme was the focus area of the discussion and presentations.  The second half of the conference focussed on building AatmaNirbhar Digital Systems and discussed the possible approaches to achieve the objectives of 5 focus areas of AatmaNirbhar Bharat i.e., Businesses, Poverty, Agriculture, New Growth Horizons and Government Reforms and enablers.