Stating that Andhra Pradesh would be in the driver’s seat of India’s digitisation campaign, Secretary, Ministry of Electronics & IT Aruna Sundararajan said on Monday the State was set to become an electronic hub with the establishment of Electronic Manufacturing Clusters (EMCs) spread across five places.
“Two have been set up at Tirupati and Sri City. We are in the process of establishing three in Visakhapatnam, Kakinada and Anantapur,” she told The Hindu here on Monday.
Ms. Sundararajan, who was here to participate in the 20th National E-Governance Conference, said sites for the new EMCs had been identified and the clusters would encourage SMEs with plug and play facilities and generate employment to the locals.
Lauding the digital initiatives of Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu after an hour-long meeting with him at Hotel Novotel, she said as India was emerging as a strong digital economy with high penetration of internet, A.P. had emerged as a pioneering State in implementing new technologies like Internet of Things, cloud computing and data analytics.
The senior IAS officer, who shot into fame for spearheading e-literacy programme in Kerala, said due to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s focus on digitisation, the number of Internet users had grown to 350 million with 100 crore phones.
She said the IT industry would double employment from 3.5 crore in the next five years.
“No country has more at stake in digital technologies than India. Both in terms of creation of jobs and GDP, the IT sector has been India’s engine for a decade or so and this can only accelerate and deepen as we go on. Digital India will craft a new paradigm of inclusion and service in India,” she said.
Ms. Sundararajan said IT contributes 10.3 per cent of GDP from 9.5 per cent two years ago. Eventually, she said they were expecting it to rise to 15 per cent in the next four to five years. She also said India was poised to become second largest startup hub after the United States in the next three to four years.
“India is one of the youngest countries in the world and the aspirations of these young people demands Digital India. The Prime Minister launched the Bharat Interface for Money (BHIM) App for going digital on December 30 and in 10 days almost 95 lakh people have already downloaded BHIM. More than 1.5 million transactions have already happened within this short span of time,” she said.
She said “e-Taal is a real-time monitor of the pace at which digital transactions in e-governance are taking place in the country. We have clocked more than 1,000 transactions in the past year. As a result of all of this, India has moved from 75th place to 25th place globally in e-participation. Also on the global rankings for e-Governance, India has moved from 124th to 107th place.”
