The government and the industry on Thursday decided to carry out a number of ‘lighthouse projects’ to spur digitisation.
“We had very fruitful discussion on how the private sector, including the IT-BPM, skilling, healthcare, banking and the education sector, can collectively work towards the digital revolution,” said IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad, after the second meeting with industry experts to prepare a roadmap for making India a trillion dollar digital economy.
The meeting was attended by Google’s Rajan Anandan, NIIT’s Rajendra Pawar, Dr. Devi Shetty of Narayana Healthcare, Mathew Oommen of Reliance Jio, among others. Besides, officials from the Ministries of Education, Telecom and Health were also present.
Mr. Prasad said a lot of individual companies would be carrying out ‘lighthouse projects’. For eg., Google will work with publishers and advertisers to bring more regional language content online, while Bharti Airtel will be working towards bringing high speed Internet to rural India as well as building data centres in the country.
The digital economy is pegged at about $413 billion at present. MeitY expects IT/ITeS sector to grow to $350 billion by 2025 from $160 billion, while the electronics sector is likely to touch $300 billion by the same time (from $100 billion now).
Telecom and e-commerce are projected to grow to $150 billion each, while sharing economy and digital skilling each presents a $30 billion opportunity.
