Digital India Programme to Offer Passport, Pensions Online: Prasad

Government is implementing the Digital India programme to transform the country into a digitally empowered and knowledge economy so that various services like passport, pension and driving licenses could be delivered online, Lok Sabha was informed Wednesday.

Telecom and IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said one of the primary focus areas of Digital India is Pillar 5:

eKranti - electronic delivery of services. "e-Kranti aims to ensure a government wide transformation by delivering all services electronically to the citizens through integrated and interoperable systems via multiple modes while ensuring efficiency, transparency and reliability of such services at affordable costs," he said during Question Hour.

In e-Kranti, 44 Mission Mode Projects (MMP) - 13 central, 17 state and 14 integrated MMPs - are being implemented. Under the 25 operational MMPs 222 services are being provided. More than 192 e-transactions have been reported since January 1, 2016.

"Under e-Kranti, the government of India has made concerted effort to make offline government services to be also delivered through online mode, ensuring that all citizens would have access to them, thereby improving the quality of basic governance on an unprecedented scale," he said.

Prasad said services being provided online include income tax, passport, immigration, core banking, pension grievance redressal, courts, police, RTI, utility payments, licenses, social welfare schemes, agriculture, municipality, land record, vehicle registration, driving license, public distribution system etc.

The Minister said so far more than 100 crore Aadhaar enrollments have been processed and that resulted in extensive use of Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) scheme for subsidies and saving of Rs. 21,000 crores.

Prasad said around 1.99 lakh common service centres have been made operational and 1,40,751 KMs OFC pipe laid and over 1,12 lakh KMs optical fibre laid for connectivity to 50,465 gram panchayats to deliver services to citizens in rural areas.

Rural tele-density has crossed 50.09 percent. Guidelines for spectrum sharing and trading and liberalisation of spectrum have been issued. More than 2 crore passport applications have been processed, he said.