The Union Cabinet on Wednesday gave its nod for the expansion of the government's flagship scheme Digital India, allocating a substantial budget of Rs 14,903 crores, Union Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said. Under the expansion, startups have been kept in focus with an aim to fund 1,200 start-ups in tier 2 and tier 3 cities.
As part of the endeavour, 6.25 lakh IT professionals will be re-skilled and up-skilled under the FutureSkills Prime Programme while 2.65 lakhs will be trained in information security under the Information Security & Education Awareness Phase (ISEA) Programme.
The government's digital document verification facility Digilocker, which allows you to store and access essential documents online, will be expanded to MSMEs and other organisations.
"There are close to 40 crore people who have subscribed to Digilocker already. Through this, small businesses can manage and safe keep their documents...Work has been progressing on the digital credit front as well. By the end of this year, you will get a good model. Just like how you have a model for digital payment, you will have one for digital credit," Vaishnaw said.
Under the extended Digital India project, nine more supercomputers will be added under the National Supercomputing Mission (NCM). Minister Vaishnaw said 18 supercomputers have already been deployed under NCM.
The modernisation of the National Knowledge Network, which connects 1,787 educational institutions in the country, to share data and resources has also been prioritised.
Cyber-awareness courses for 12 crore college students, the expansion of Bhashini, the AI-enabled multi-language translation tool, and facilitating 540 additional services in the UMANG app/platform are the other key announcements.