The Government of India has announced the Digital Villages initiative, during the Budget 2019. Finance Minister Piyush Goyal announced the initiative to connect as many as 1 lakh villages with the digital services offered by the Government, within the next five years. Goyal went on to say that the Jan Dhan Yojna, the Aadhaar scheme and the penetration of mobile phones have become “game changers”.
This follows the Digital Village or Digi Gaon Yojna announced last year, which has set a target of covering 700 villages in India by the end of 2018. It was designed to connect villages with Wi-Fi access and also assist residents with entrepreneurship opportunities such as setting up cottage industries. Just yesterday, President Ram Nath Kovind in his address to the nation had said more than 1.16 lakh village panchayats have been connected with optical fibre under the Digital India programme, and around 40,000 village panchayats have also been provided with WiFi hotspots. According to comparative numbers, in 2014 only 59 village panchayats had digital connections across the country.
Goyal went on to say in the Budget 2019 speech that India is leading the consumption of voice calls and mobile data using our mobile phones, which he specified is an increase of over 50 times in the past five years. India has the lowest mobile and data tariffs in the world.
In the Budget 2019 speech, finance minister Piyush Goyal also announced that the Make in India initiative has succeeded in the past few years. He says that now 268 companies are manufacturing mobile phones in India now, as compared with 2 companies earlier.
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