In his maiden Union Budget 2019 speech, Finance Minister Piyush Goyal presented an outlay for the facelift of the rural areas in India by announcing the government’s roadmap for ‘Digital Villages’ in next five years. The Modi government has earmarked the next five years, which will be crucial if it returns to the Centre post-Lok Sabha elections this year, that will see the development of over 1 lakh Digital Villages in India. Besides, the Finance Minister outlined the emergence of Artificial Intelligence and its implementation into various sectors in the country.
The Digital Villages will be set up by the government agency Common Services Centres (CSCs) over the next five years, Finance Minister Piyush Goyal announced amid rousing applause in the Parliament. The CSCs will be responsible for developing the digital infrastructure that will be implemented while remodelling the villages in India into ‘Digital Villages’. It is, however, not clear when exactly the groundwork for setting up Digital Villages will kick off.
Artificial Intelligence is proving to become ubiquitous across different government projects – something Finance Minister Piyush Goyal cheered at the budget presentation in the Parliament. Goyal announced that the government will soon begin the process of building a national portal for AI services that will be available across government-run websites, services, and centres, in addition to being available for interested businesses in India. The AI services will be a pivot for the National Centre of AI that will be in the works soon, Goyal said.
“India has become the second largest hub of startups. In order to take benefits of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and related technologies to the people, a national programme on artificial intelligence has been envisaged by our government. This should be catalysed by the establishment of the National Centre of AI as a hub along with centres of excellence. Nine priority areas have been identified,” Goyal said.
Finance Minister Goyal also mentioned that there are 3 lakh CSCs operating across the country to provide government services with the help of technology. The government plans to elevate the schemes and services offered by CSCs to create a model for Digital Villages across the country. The digital infrastructure in the digital economy will be developed on using the successful models that government has achieved in the recent years of its tenure as the baseline.
With the vision for making India’s villages digital, the Modi government is leveraging the development done in BJP’s five-year tenure in the form of BharatNet, Digital India, and Make in India projects. The Finance Minister also said that India is now leading the global markets in mobile data consumption, which has increased manifold by up to 50 times per month under the government’s current regime. This is in line with the various empowering moves made by the government to escalate the use of digital services to prevent any meddling in the operation so that the benefits are directly transferred to the citizens.

Source: financialexpress.com