‘All citizen services to be made digital in next two years’

livemint.com:

NEW DELHI : India aims to offer all public services through the digital public infrastructure over the next two years, said minister of electronics and information technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar. DPIs will deepen and widen the availability of government-to-citizen services and drive inclusion, he said.

He added that services spanning the social sector, including education, skilling and health programmes would be provided through digital platforms. “We are currently in the midst of a second wave of digitization, and in the next two years we will make sure that there is no public service that is not delivered on our digital public platform.

So, (whether) it’s education, skilling, health, all the other social sector things that we do —except for building roads and building railways—effectively almost all of the government and the government to citizen interface will be digital over the next two years," he said at the Economist Impact event ahead of a B20 summit of businesses from G20 countries. “We are seeing the India stack growing deeper and wider at the application level.

So we see absolutely no reason for anything that is of relevance in terms of government or public service to be not on the India stack," he said. The minister added that while data was a commodity that was available in plenty in a digitized economy, there have to be “guard rails and rules" on how the data will be used.

This would also ensure symmetry in the relationship between the individual whose data is being taken and the platforms that consume the user data on public platforms, which has been looked at under the digital personal data protection law. “...Governments around the world and in particular in India, we take our duty to maintain balance