The Capital has emerged as the top-ranked State in terms of overall Internet readiness, overtaking last year’s winner Maharashtra, according to a report titled Index of Internet Readiness of Indian States, published by the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) and Nielsen.
e-infrastructure
The city has taken the first slot not only among small States and Union Territories but also when all States are taken together. New Delhi is followed by Karnataka, Maharashtra, Kerala and Tamil Nadu. It has emerged on the top primarily because of its e-infrastructure and e-participation, stated the report.
Among smaller States, Delhi is followed by Chandigarh and Puducherry.
Aruna Sundararajan, Secretary, Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology, who released the report, said: “We’re hopeful that India will leapfrog from the present 155th position to world’s top five in connectivity within the next five-six years.”
She added that various indigenous digital platforms along with innovative and disruptive start-ups held the greatest scope for digital transformation in India.
“Post demonetisation, the country today has three million point of sale [POS] compared to 1.5 lakh POS earlier, which is clearly a transformation,” she added.
Composite benchmark
Internet readiness index is a composite benchmark of four components — e-infrastructure index, e-participation index, IT-environment and government e-services index.
The report states that one of the key highlights of this year’s report was measuring the digital start-up ecosystem of States.
It found that Karnataka, Delhi and Maharashtra had the highest number of digital start-ups.
