—By Prateek N Kumar, NeoNiche
1980s and 90s were the decades when my generation was growing up attuned to song requests made on AIR by people from a non-descript town called “Jhumri Tilaya” and Lalitaji’s pearls of wisdom on which washing powder made our clothes look whiter or how a particular Scooter brand was creating stronger images of stronger India as it was hard to miss on Sunday morning television along with “Ramayana” and “Mahabharata”.
We kept trying to save a particular character’s girlfriend in the name of Video games. Digital camera was still a distant dreams to the ubiquitous Camera Rolls, X-Boxes and PlayStation were unheard of and life was about scarcity and limited choices. Things already changed when 90s brought the economic liberalization. I coin that liberalization 1.0.
And testimony to that was on Wednesday 1st July 2015,even a 15,000-capacity stadium in Delhi seemed small for a venue when the Prime Minister launched the “Digital India Week” to empower citizens with the use of IT.
What does it mean is a whole new world where globalization and technology advancement will further shape the way we perceived and see things like never before. Which will give rise to a whole new breed of Consumers. Consumption will no longer be about available choices but getting what you want on your terms.
The campaign is as much an invitation to domestic and foreign companies as a promise to improve systems, remove bureaucratic sloth and reduce red-tape that often delays processes and decision-making, and encourage start-up enterprises.PM Modi’s promise of digital lockers to store documents, e-Sign using Aadhaar, e-Hospital systems, National Scholarship Portal, Centre of Excellence on Internet on Things (IoT) and a high-speed digital highway — that aims to make government services more efficient, easily accessible and hassle-free.
Whenever the government has trusted the industry, it has performed but what is more exciting about the initiative is that This will be a true step to connect villages with better infrastructure and broadband at Gram Panchayat level . connecting the entire country which will create opportunities of uniform communication to every citizen thereby creating a level playing field.
My key takeaway from PM’s announcements
1.e-Sign framework which will allow citizens add their digital signatures to documents online using Aadhaar.
2. MyGov.in portal will become an online platform to engage citizens in governance through a “Discuss, act and share making the entire system collaborative and transparent.
3. Approach. Bharat Net program as a high-speed digital highway to connect all 250,000 gram panchayats of country — the world’s largest rural broadband project using optical fiber.
4. Broadband Highways’ as one of the pillars of Digital India to address the connectivity issues while enabling and providing technologies facilitating delivery of services to citizens. Will help in faster response to every governance “call to action”.
5. Centre of Excellence on Internet on Things (IoT), as a joint initiative of the government agencies and private institutions such as Nasscom.
What it brings is a whole new India will emerge one which will not only match the world but lead the world .As digital marketer we would love to contribute and make it a reality after all its our bread and butter.
Any work in the area of digitization must be accompanied by more work on cyber security. The PM himself spoke of bloodless wars that will fought in future in cyberspace with telling effect. And to that effect more work is required both at R&D, Creating laws and companies having a detailed IT policies.
Startup ecosystem will get a level playing field due to Growth Hacking and crowdsourcing but even more out of SAS model of doing the business with least government and most governance while large enterprises will be able to manage Big Data to bring cost efficient relevant and customer services.
I would say the current Digital India initiative will lead to Liberalization 2.0 …It would be all about life in a connected world .
The article was first published in CXOtoday.com