India To Launch Aadhaar-like Digital Platforms for Agriculture, Healthcare and Education

India is all set to launch Aadhaar-like public digital platforms in areas like healthcare, agriculture and education. These public digital gateways will add to India's digital backbone, and open up opportunities, according to Ajay Prakash Sawhney, secretary, ministry of electronics and information technology (MeITy).

The new digital platforms will offer services to the public in areas like matching jobs with skills and logistics aggregation, too, beside healthcare, education and agriculture. The MeITy secretary said these are being developed by a pool of experts and will open up a lot of opportunities to the private sector for developing tools and devices that can help citizens to access these platforms and carry out innovative pursuits.

Referring to already existing digital platforms like Aadhaar (Unique Identification Card), payment gateways like UPI, etc and how they opened up unique digital ecosystems in the country, Sawhney pointed out how India has developed considerable depth and expertise in developing such platforms.

Sawhney also referred to the progress in areas like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) and talked about innovations like the Aarogya Setu app. A startup of 15 young technocrats developed an app during the pandemic days to identify people infected, those living close to the area, identifying containment areas as well as tips and methods for social distancing and sanitisation, MeITy secretary pointed out, adding that the same app was also being used for getting target groups vaccinated.

Holding it up as examples of the breakthroughs India achieved in the COVID-19 days, he said that the momentum would continue in innovation, disruption and value adding to products and processes. The MeITy secretary was talking at the opening of IndiaSoft 2021, organised by the Electronics and Computer Software Export Promotion Council (ESC) on Friday night.

SOURCE - The Week