The Government on Tuesday said it will come out with a defined timeline and cost estimates for achieving various objectives of National Policy on Information Technology (NPIT) 2012 by December.
The NPIT was approved by the Cabinet on September 14. It has wide objectives, including increasing revenue of IT and IT-enabled services (ITES) industry from $100 billion to $300 billion by 2020, expanding exports from $69 billion to $200 billion by 2020 and creating 10 million additional skilled manpower.
Key aspects
“The Government is also looking to enhance domestic consumption of IT services to increase the size of the industry. E-governance is one of the important aspects that will increase domestic use of IT,” J. Satyanarayana, Secretary, Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY), said.
The Secretary also said there are around 30 schemes under various policies such as Cyber Security Policy and Social Media Policy, which are soon expected to be approved by the Cabinet under the 12th Plan.
“We are hoping that in the remaining four years of the 12th Plan period, these schemes are implemented. Specific timelines will come by end of this quarter (December),” he said.
PPP model
The Government is looking at private-public-partnerships model in various projects including the Cyber Security Policy, which are interested in working with the Government. “We have got response from the industry,” he said.
One of the policy’s aims is to produce 3,000 PhDs in the field of ICT every year by 2020 and by the end of the 12th Plan, DeitY hopes to get 1,500 PhDs in the country annually through various programmes with universities and institutes, Satyanarayana said.
DeitY, which announced recently it would start a common (non-emergency) telephone number ‘166’ for the convenience of public to get information, said it is planning to start it by this year-end.
This will enable people to get the latest information and status of their application in government offices on services such as ration card and electricity connection.
“We are in the process and talking to telecom operators to make ‘166’ operational,” Rajendra Kumar, Joint Secretary, DeitY, said, adding that at present the Department is operating the five-digit phone number ‘51969’ which is limited to sending and receiving information through SMS only.
Voice response system
He said ‘166’ will have interactive voice response system helping people follow instructions being provided through phone to access services quickly.
Normal call rates as per the tariff plan of the subscriber will apply for using the services through this common number, he added.