Mission of Digital India to empower common man: Ravi Shankar Parsad

CHANDIGARH: Union Minister for Electronics and Information Technology, Ravi Shankar Parsad said that the mission of Digital India is to empower common man in the country.
Unveiling the Incubation Facility of STPI Mohali, the Union Minister said that digital India is for the poor and underprivileged in the society and directed STPI Mohali to provide special facilities to promote entrepreneurship amongst dalit youth.

Listing out the growth in diverse areas of country’s economy on the digital front, the union minister commended STPI for helping the IT industry grow and create newer employment opportunities, reaching 3 lakh crores in software exports out of which Rs. 3 lakh crores is being generated from the Tier II cities.

"Digital India, Startup India, Standup India are the programmes that are transforming our country and empowering the people having reached phenomenal growth reaching 103 crore mobile phones, issuing 105 crores adhaar cards, 40 crores broadband connections expected to reach 50 crores by next year, and 27 crores smart phones, "he added.

STPI shall very soon be laying the foundation stone of its next centre in Amritsar to help the smaller cities become part of the digital India movement.

He hoped that the country which had very few mobile phone manufacturing units has attracted fresh FDI and there are over 40 such manufacturing units in the country, and hoped that manufacturing facility for mobiles would come up in Punjab too.

The largest incubation facility for the startups amongst the Tier-II cities, and the only with such a big data centre in the country, would ramp up the region’s march towards one of the most favoured IT destination in the country.

Spread over nearly 1.40 lakh square feet of built-up space, the incubation facility would go a long way in encouraging new IT/ITES entrepreneurs and startups to make it a hub for entrepreneurship.

This would provide a major boost to the IT companies in Punjab to enable them to host their software applications and data, securely and safely at a fraction of the cost, instead of their own dedicated data centre.

The building also houses Network Operation Centre equipped with infrastructure to ensure networking services, firewalls, servers, routers, and 100% redundant bandwidth for the users in the building.

The incubation facility has a dedicated Tier-III standard world-class data centre of 160 rack capacity available to startups to use it for big data analytics and software as a service, informed Dr Omkar Rai, Director General of STPI, informed.

Over 60,000 sqft area from third to the sixth floors provides warm shells and 100-seats Plug-and-Play modular office space for the startups to operationalize their businesses within hours.

The facility compliments the startup ecosystem that STPI had been encouraging in the region and intends to create robust and active partnership amongst academia, research institutions, industry, professional bodies, investors and financial institutions, to help the startups grow.