Page 4 - Digital Indial

PRAVIN PRASHANT
EDITOR & DIRECTOR, DigiAnalysys

FOREWORD

India has the potential to achieve $5 trillion economy by 2025 and Digital India program has a larger
role to play in reaching this target. In terms of breakup it is expected, 1 trillion dollar will be achieved
from agriculture and allied activities, 1 trillion from manufacturing and 3 trillion from services. Keep-
ing this in view, the services sector has to be expanded to include verticals like FinTech, AgriTech,
EduTech, HealthTech and others. These verticals should not be limited to India geography but should
also look at global market in an aggressive way.
“Digital India: Way Forward” Compendium on Building A New Age India talks about futuristic road-
map to achieve this magical number by strengthening the nine pillars of Digital India. The more these
pillars are strengthened through government policies, industry expertise, academia research and
startup innovation, one can witness a quantum jump in the Indian economy as the potential is im-
mense. The need of the hour is for all stakeholders to work together in a more synergistic and time
bound manner with a common goal.
Focus should be on using emerging technologies like 5G, IoT, Blockchain, AR/VR/MR, ML/DL and
others so that we are in line with the developments happening in the developed economies and glo-
bal standards are formulated keeping in view India requirements rather than retrofitting solutions to
meet India requirements. All this will definitely give a big boost to our Startup and R&D community as
they can develop cutting edge products and solutions which can cater to worldwide requirements and
also meet India requirement both on product as well as services standpoint.
Digital India is a giant step towards transforming India be it cities through Smart Cities and villages
through DigiGaon or Digital Villages. Presently, the focus is on providing villages with world class Next
Generation Digital Infrastructure through BharatNet for connecting Gram Panchayats through optic
fiber and WiFi thereby providing high bandwidth applications to the doorstep of a common man. For
Smart Cities, the combined effort of all operators has resulted in improved data speed but it needs to
be improved further with the sharing of optic fiber in a big way by creating a common optic fiber map
of all operators combined.
According to analysts, the Digital India plan could boost GDP up to $1 trillion by 2025 and this can play
a key role in macro-economic factors such as GDP growth, employment generation, labor productiv-
ity, growth in number of businesses and also restrict revenue leakages for the government.
This compendium has been presented to you with the purpose of not only introducing Digital India to
the people who have just got exposed to it, but also for the ones who want to have a deeper and updat-
ed view of the marquee initiative. The key recommendations section of the Compendium will definitely
help India to leapfrog and move ahead with coordinated and time bound effort of all stakeholders.
DigiAnalysys and its knowledge partners for this compendium, techARC, spent over 4 months of time
in collecting the information, interacting with stakeholders and finally shaping it all in a book form.
I would like to thank all the industry stalwarts, colleagues, contributors and both the teams at DigiAn-
alysys and techARC for putting up herculean effort in bringing out this comprehensive compendium
that becomes an important referencer about Digital India.