What Digital India Can Mean For Cloud Telephony

Digital India – Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s pet project that launched last year is a massively ambitious project. With spend estimates of more than $17 Billion USD over the next three to five years, it aspires to transform India with cutting-edge digital infrastructure. The project aims at increasing mobile connectivity and high-speed internet penetration across the country. One major area of focus is to make government services and essential services like healthcare easily accessible electronically.

What does Digital India Mean for Cloud Telephony?

With improving Internet infrastructure, cloud telephony is already growing at the rate of 27% a year. Businesses have switched to cloud telephony due to its ease of use, low cost, and minimal downtime.

In the face of this trend, here are a few ways in which the ‘Digital India’ initiative will impact the growth of Cloud Telephony directly.

Public services and Governance on Demand

One of the significant benefits foreseen through the Digital India initiative is that citizens will gain access to public services and benefits online. With the Government of India seeking to integrate services across departments and jurisdictions, people can expect access to services in real-time.  With a massive uptick in the number of people accessing such services, cloud telephony will easily be the first choice for scale, efficiency, and economy for the government to provide such services.

The core utility to every citizen- Digital infrastructure

Digital infrastructure is expected to penetrate remote villages, Panchayats, schools, education centres, and public wi-fi hotspots. With increased access to the internet, citizens will find better ways to interact with both private and public enterprises, thereby improving the quality of customer support and reach.

Supporting multiple locations

The culture of remote work is already on its way to becoming a norm. It can only be expected to entrench itself firmly as a work culture with the advent of Digital India. The initiative promises to bring over a 100 crore people on the mobile and cloud network with a grand plan for connectivity. It is expected to open the floodgates to increased opportunities. For organizations to cater to increasing customer demands, setting up on-demand cloud telephony systems will be the best bet. The best part would be that the support can be highly mobile and will need little or no relocation.

Powering Tech For Those With Minimal Resources

The vision of Digital India is to give the power of technology to people with nothing more than a basic mobile phone to communicate. Platforms like AgroStar have helped 7,00,000 farmers procure raw material and track their produce by simply giving a missed called or through the AgroStar mobile application. Pratham Books ran a grand campaign with a vision to put a book in every underprivileged child’s hand. The future foresees many powerful social- impact platforms heavily dependent on empowering communication and connections between communities. Cloud Telephony plays a major role in this development.

Explosion in employment and entrepreneurship

One of Digital India’s objectives is to create about 5 crore jobs along with generating indirect jobs in several sectors. Sectors like health, education, banking, agriculture can expect a major overhaul. Digital India also expects people to opt into participative governance models like E-courts for fast-track court proceedings, Common Service Centre for public services, MyGov.in for participation in civil issues, etc.

Mann Ki Baat

One of the grand successes of PM Modi’s term is his public reach out program, Mann Ki Baat. The program is a mega-hit with the PM discussing current issues and welcoming solutions from the general public and has a reach of over a billion people. One of the reasons that this program is so popular is that people can participate in governance by simply giving a missed call to air their thoughts. The only means to scale this facility to billions of people is through cloud telephony.

If Digital India is to achieve its grand vision, Cloud telephony is its indispensable partner in making India shine.

 

The original version of the article appeared in Data Quest’s print edition.

Manisha Mishra

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