Union Budget’s ‘Digital India’ push

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Initiatives for Digital India push-

From building a digital library for children and adolescents to formulating a National Data Governance policy, the minister announced a wide range of schemes and proposals during her address. They are:

Digital Public Infrastructure for Agriculture: 

• It will be an open source, open standard and interoperable public good. 
• The platform will offer inclusive, farmer-centric solutions through relevant information services for crop planning and health, improved access to farm inputs, credit, and insurance, help for crop estimation, market intelligence, and support for the growth of the agri-tech industry and start-ups.

National Digital Library for Children and Adolescents: 

• This will be established for facilitating the availability of quality books in different languages, genres and at different levels. 
• The government will also try to inculcate a culture of reading by collaborating with NGOs, which will provide age-appropriate reading material to everyone. 
• The National Book Trust and Children’s Book Trust will also step in and the library would be “device-agnostic”.

Centres of Excellence for Artificial Intelligence: 

• There is a proposal for setting up three centres of excellence for Artificial Intelligence in top educational institutions. 
• These centres, in partnership with leading players in the industry, will conduct interdisciplinary research and develop cutting-edge applications and scalable problem solutions in the areas of agriculture, health, and sustainable cities.

National Data Governance Policy: 

• Government will formulate a data governance policy to enable access to anonymised data for innovation and research by start-ups and academia.

Other initiatives-

• 5G Services: A hundred labs will be established in engineering institutions for developing applications using 5G services to realise a new range of opportunities, business models, and employment potential.
• E-Courts: Government will roll out phase three of the E-Courts project to ensure the efficient administration of justice.
• Bharat Shared Repository of Inscriptions (Bharat SHRI): A digital epigraphy museum will be established and one lakh ancient inscriptions will be digitised in the first stage.
• Skill India Digital Platform: The digital ecosystem for skilling will be further expanded by launching a unified Skill India Digital platform for enabling demand-based formal skilling, linking with employers including MSMEs and facilitating access to entrepreneurship schemes.

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