The government has launched four new digital initiatives and a cohort of institutions supported under the Chip to Startup (C2S) programme in a bid to enhance the accessibility of technology and streamline service delivery.
The initiatives, including Digital India Bhashini, Digital India Gen-Next Support for Innovation Startups (GENESIS), Indiastack.global, and MyScheme, were launched at the Digital India Week 2022 exhibition on July 4, 2022.
The Digital India Bhashini scheme will enable easy access to the internet and digital services in Indian languages, including voice-based access, and facilitate content creation by leveraging language-based machine learning models. This will require the creation of multilingual datasets that will be built through a crowdsourced exercise called BhashaDaan.
Meanwhile, the Digital India GENESIS is an initiative to empower startups to discover, support, grow and make successful ventures in small towns of India. The government outlay for the scheme is Rs 7.50 billion.
Further, the Indiastack.global initiative is a repository of open standards and interoperability principles of key projects implemented under the Digital India Mission such as Aadhar, unified payments interface (UPI), Digilocker, etc. The repository will help other countries looking to implement such projects at population scale.
Finally, the Myscheme initiative is a discovery platform that aims to be a one-stop search and discovery portal for users to find which schemes they are eligible for.
The government also announced the cohort of 30 institutions that will be supported under the C2S scheme, under the India Semiconductor Mission. The institutions will be empowered to train 85,000 specialised workforce in semiconductor design. The C2S programme aims to facilitate 175 unique semiconductor designs, 30 internet protocol (IP) cores, 20 systems and 25 startups. The institute selected in the cohort includes NIT Manipur, India Institute of Technology Design and Manufacturing, Andhra Pradesh, Kurukshetra University, Haryana, and Indian Institute of Information Technology, among others. The programme will also offer organisational-level mentoring and facilities for chip design.
