The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) organised a meeting with IT secretaries of states and union territories (UTs) to discuss Digital India initiatives for ease of living and ease of doing business. The meeting, held under the chairmanship of Alkesh Kumar Sharma, secretary, MeitY, was attended by 28 states and UTs and senior representatives from MeitY and its organisations namely National Informatics Centre, National Informatics Centre Services Inc., Digital India Corporation, Centre for Development of Advanced Computing, National Institute of Electronics and Information Technology, Unique Identification Authority of India, Bhaskaracharya Institute for Space Applications and Geoinformatics, and Software Technology Park of India.
The latest initiatives of MeitY comprising the budget announcements made for 2023-24, electronics manufacturing including semiconductor manufacturing, e-governance – Aadhaar-based address update, entity DigiLocker, Digital Government Policy, emerging technologies, chips to startup, national blockchain framework and secured cloud solutions were showcased and shared during the meeting. All participating states and UTs shared their latest citizen-centric e-governance initiatives, use of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, blockchain, drone, internet of things etc. for governance especially in health, agriculture, property registration and mining areas, electronics manufacturing and the progress of digital infrastructure and upcoming and planned areas of improvements.
In his remarks, Alkesh Kumar Sharma shared the Digital India progress made since the last such meeting and the plan of action for the fiscal year 2023-24. He appreciated the states and UTs for sharing their best practices and latest Digital India Initiatives. He sought suggestions from states to make the upcoming IT ministers’ conference action-oriented. He emphasised that cross-sharing of the latest digital developments and replication of these are important to save time and effort and to accelerate digital governance.
