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Time of India

PM Modi Blogs: India ready for global digital leadership

Live Events (You can now subscribe to our (You can now subscribe to our Economic Times WhatsApp channel In the coming decade India will focus on global digital leadership and "the world is looking at India for the next digital breakthrough," PM Narendra Modi said on Tuesday. In a blog post marking 10 years of the country's ambitious Digital India programme, he wrote that 'the next decade will be even more transformative. We are moving from digital governance to global digital leadership, from India-first to India-for-the-world."Addressing all innovators, entrepreneurs, and dreamers, the PM urged them to build what empowers. "Let us solve what truly matters. Let us lead with technology that unites, includes, and uplifts."Flagship projects such as the $1.2 billion IndiaAI Mission enabling GPU access at less than a dollar per GPU hour, is making India not just the most affordable internet economy, but also the most affordable compute destination. The New Delhi Declaration on AI promotes innovation with responsibility. AI Centres of Excellence are being established across the country. "India has championed humanity-first AI," Modi India has not remained a mere government programme, it has become a people's movement and is "central to building an Aatmanirbhar Bharat and to making India a trusted innovation partner to the world," he noted. Terming it a "bold journey into uncharted territory with great conviction", the prime minister pointed to many who "doubted whether a country as vast and diverse as India could truly go digital."In 2014, India had around 25 crore internet connections, today 97 crore Indians are online. Over 42 lakh kilometres of Optical Fibre Cable- equivalent to 11 times the distance between Earth and the Moon- now connects even the most remote villages. High-speed internet now reaches urban hubs and forward military posts alike including Galwan, Siachen, and Stack, the country's digital backbone, has enabled platforms like UPI, which now handles over 100 billion transactions a year. Around half of all real time digital transactions happen in Direct Benefit Transfer, over ₹44 lakh crore has been transferred directly to citizens, cutting out middlemen and saving ₹3.48 lakh crore in leakages, the PM said. "Schemes like SVAMITVA have issued more than 2.4 crore property cards and mapped 6.47 lakh villages, ending years of land-related uncertainty," Modi India's digital economy is empowering MSMEs and small entrepreneurs. "From Banarasi weavers to bamboo artisans in Nagaland, sellers are now reaching customers nationwide, without middlemen or digital monopolies," he is now among the top three startup ecosystems in the world. Its Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI), from Aadhaar, CoWIN, DigiLocker, and FASTag to PM-WANI and One Nation One Subscription, is now studied and adopted globally.