Digital PM

After his rock star like reception at Madison Square Garden last time, it sounds like Narendra Modi is ready to take Silicon Valley by storm when he visits the US later this month: the 19,000 seat community reception venue is already over-booked. The planned townhall-style question-and-answer session at Facebook’s headquarters is the one getting all the limelight; but Modi will also be meeting a lot of other Silicon Valley CEO’s. Like those of Adobe, Apple, Google and Tesla.

But why the focus on Silicon Valley? Is it just because Modi is Internet savvy (After all, he was on Time magazine’s list of “30 most influential people in the Internet”)? Or is it because the Valley has so many Indian origin folks?

Sure, there may be a bit of those things; but it’s also to do with driving forward his government’s Digital India initiative. The intent of that is to make available government services electronically (and via the Net), thereby reducing delays, paperwork, bureaucracy and corruption.

The Digital India initiative has 3 core components:
-         The creation of digital infrastructure e.g. broadband, wi-fi, Internet access points in rural areas;
-         Delivering services digitally;
-         Digital literacy.
Modi needs Silicon Valley’s participation to make that happen:
“The visit allows Modi to build relationships with tech firms that want to invest in India, while also fostering support from the Bay Area's influential Indian-American community.”
(And in Apple’s case, he also hopes to convince them to “Make in India”!)

But if we go full digital as a nation, then security is something that becomes critical. And those security measures need to start right at the OS level because most of the widely used OS’s are American (Windows, iOS, Android); and are prone to demands from the US government on providing backdoors to access data. The government does seem to have that in mind:
“A highly improved version of BOSS (Bharat Operating System Solutions) developed by C-DAC (Centre for Development of Advanced Computing) will be unveiled and discussed in an internal meeting in union home ministry in this week. It has successfully tested fending itself from all kinds of attacks during the past three months of trial. Several government agencies including the Army intelligence were given the task to attack it to test its vulnerability status but they all failed to break it.”

It’s good to know that the government is considering and acting on such matters; thereby showing signs of end-to-end thinking and not just coming up with catchy slogans.

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