For years, India has been a complex nation, making it difficult for the common man to access government services. The rapid adoption of digital technology across sectors is making things easy and eliminating all forms of human intervention. This has a major impact on the efficiency and effectiveness of governance.

The world is getting digitized a rapid pace. The pace of digital data generation, dropping costs of data storage and compute infrastructure have enabled digitalisation at unprecedented levels which is now being termed as the 4th Industrial revolution.

• In the last few years, governance in India across sectors has been redefined through business process reengineering, technology and data analytics. Technology is reshaping the way government is designing and implementing programmes.
• The government launched several major and minor e-governance and digitalisation programmers which were all later brought into the fold of “Digital India” programme. After the launch of 31 Mission Mode Projects under e- Kranti : National e-Governance Plan 2.0, due to growing adoption of new platforms such as “mobile” and “cloud ”,a need Programme with the vision of “Transforming e-Governance “. All e-Governance projects now follow the key principles of e- Kranti namely ‘ Transformation and not Translation’ ,Integrated Services and not Individual Services’, ‘Government Process Reengineering (GPR) to be mandatory in every MMP’, ‘ICT Infrastructure on Demand’, Cloud by Default’, Mobile First ‘, Fast Tracking Approvals’, ‘Language Localization’, ‘National GIS (Geo-Spatial Information System)’,Security and Electronic Data Preservation’.
• India has combined the use of unique biometric identifiers and financial inclusion for effectiveness in social benefits and to reduce the vast number of illegitimate beneficiaries. Under welfare programmes. The Direct benefit Transfer (DBT).

Financial Inclusion:

• The JAM (Jan Dhan – Aadhaar – Mobile) trinity forms the basic data infrastructure for the India Stack services consisting of e-KYC, eSign, instantaneous payments (UPI) and files storage (Dig locker).
• It has been the single largest factor for expansion of financial inclusion across the world. According to the Global Findex Report 2017 released by World Bank.
• 55 per cent of all bank accounts crated during 2014-17 were opened in India through the Jan Dhan Yojana.
• The proportion of Indian adults with bank accounts has increased from 53 per cent in 2014 to 80 per cent in 2017.

Public Finance and Public Procurement going Digital:

• The Public Financial Management System (PFMS) has led to the creation of a financial management platform for all plan schemes, a database of all recipient agencies, integration with core banking solution of banks, integration of state treasurers and tracking of fund flow to the lowest tier of implementation of plan schemes on real times basis. PFMS has also led to just in– time release of funds and efficient management in the use of funds.
• In 2016, Government e- marketplace (GeM) was launched for single window online procurement of commonly used, small value goods and services.
• GeM enables direct purchase, e – auctions, online registration facilities for government users, product sellers, and service providers and provides a market place for government purchase.

Pioneers in Innovative Consumer Payments:

• Unified Payments Interface (UPI) and Bharat Bill Payment System (BBPS) have triggered a plethora of private sector – innovated apps, which have significantly eased citizens’ bill payments towards services provided by the government.

Digital Transformation:

• Digitalisation of collection of direct taxes has led to huge benefits.
• The rollout of the goods and services tax (GST) has resulted in a 50 per cent increase in unique indirect taxpayers compared with the pre – GST system.
• It has lead to a radical formalisation of the economy.

Digital Monitoring:

• In the Pro – Active Governance and Timely Implementation (PRAGATI) programme, Prime Minister has used technology to cut across departmental silos and geographical boundaries to ensure speedy project implementation.
• The recently proposed Ayushman Bharat scheme will digitally link primary and community health centres with district hospitals.

Impact of Frontier Technologies:

• The government is exploring the use of new technologies and their potential adoption in government processes and schemes NITI Aayog, mandated with the task of developing the National Programme on Artificial Intelligence, has been engaged in discussion with ministries, academia, industry researchers and start-ups. This is a qualitative effort to understand the technologies, their utility for the economy and governance, risk they pose and their future development trajectory. Further, implementation.
• Proof – of – concept (PoC) projects and are being tested in areas of precision agriculture, using AI, land records on block chain, assistive healthcare diagnostics using AI etc. The effectiveness of the technologies in solving the feasibility of adopting frontier technologies in governance at a national scale.
• Rapid adoption of digital technology across sectors has a major impact on the efficiency and effectiveness of governance.