India’s growing digital infrastructure to come as reality soon

 S Mohini Ratna Editor VARINDIA

A big question keeps coming to my mind as to how make India digital. It is really a million-dollar question. It could be achieved through social media which is an excellent platform to enlist the support of the public by inviting their concrete views and suggestions about digitization. Digital India will provide intelligent networks which will transform the delivery of civic services such as transportation, public utilities, security, entertainment, education, and healthcare through high-performance connectivity, application uptime, reliability, disaster recovery and data backup capabilities.

The convergence of emerging technologies like SMAC has thrown up new challenges, as only 9% of Indian enterprises have a data protection plan for social, hybrid cloud and mobile data. With an increasing number of people using electronic devices, machines and sensors coming online across the Internet of Everything, companies will continue to require sophisticated technology to cope with the large volume of data which will be generated. The data produced worldwide will grow ten times by 2020, and in India by 2018 there will be 526 million total Internet users and 1.5 billion networked devices and the mobile data traffic will grow 24-fold by 2018. Going forward, by complementing the launch of several initiatives being taken by the Government, there has been an exponential rise in the number of desktops, laptops and smartphones as well as Internet searches this year – a trend that is reflective of India’s growing digital infrastructure. Now many countries are looking at India as the largest market in terms of investment, and the perception is changing with the multiple initiatives taken by the Government of India such as “Make in India”, “Invest in India” and “Digital India”. These initiatives are game-changers from the perspective of delivering pro-citizen good governance and it will spread across the country by connecting all panchayats with broadband by 2016. There is no denying the fact that India is a land of opportunities with a huge potential for providing 600 million broadband connections in the next 5–6 years, and the number of Indian online buyers is also expected to grow to 128 million by 2018. As the pace of migration from rural areas to cities is increasing, it is important that development should also reach them. We see a positive traction in the industry with “Building Smart Cities” launched by Hon’ble Prime Minister Narendra Modi, which will pave the way for building 100 smart cities across the country with GIS-based (Geographic Information System) town planning, using the latest technology. These cities will have integrated waste management and advanced transport systems and these cities are going to run completely on technology with Wi-Fi-powered houses and open spaces, minimal human intervention and high-speed connectivity for better life of residents. Lastly, the recently organized high-level industry round table on the importance of developing smarter and resilient cities in India will offer ample opportunities to the infrastructure players. I conclude with the hope that the 2015 year will rejuvenate the Indian economy.