Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who becomes the first Indian Prime Minister to visit Silicon Valley in more than three decades, has announced a few measures to bridge the digital divide - while speaking about his ambitious Digital India initiative before a gathering of Silicon Valley tech leaders. Digital India' is an enterprise to transform India in a scale unmatched anywhere in the world and it has the potential to make development truly inclusive, said Modi during the Digital India and Digital Technology Dinner.
India is teaming up with Google to have free WiFi at 500 railway stations. Also, the government intends to set up digital locker for every citizen to share documents across departments.
"We want our 1.25 billion citizens to be digitally connected," Modi said, describing the steps taken by his government towards broadband connectivity. "We already have broadband usage across India go by up 63 per cent last year. We need to accelerate this further," he added.
"We have launched an aggressive expansion of the National Optic Fibre network that will take broadband to 6 lakh villages. The governments aims to connect all schools and colleges in India with broadband."
"We must ensure that technology is accessible, affordable and adds value," he said, adding that his government is giving highest priority to cyber security, intellectual property.
Modi said that the government is also working towards setting up Common Service Centres (CSCs) in villages and towns.
We will promote manufacture of quality and affordable products in India, said the PM. "That is part of our vision of Make in India and Digital India," states Modi.
"In this digital age, we have an opportunity to transform lives of people in ways that was hard to imagine just a couple of decades ago," the Prime Minister said, adding that the pace at which people are taking to digital technology defies stereotypes of age, education, language and income.
(With inputs from PTI)
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