Intel-lectually #DigitalIndia : Cocoon To Butterfly

A Digital India in my opinion is a dream initiative that will need streams of efforts from multiple directions. It is not something like a light bulb that you go to a small dark house in a remote village, pull the electrical wire, connect a holder at its end, put the bulb in the holder and the house will be showered with light. Here the darkness is inside, the bulb that is to be lighted is not possible without the will power of the person in whose life this 'Digital' light is to be sparked. The whole process has to be neat and clean with noble intentions and there has to be a strong governance at each and every step. Else it will be just another money laundering mechanism where a lot will be shown as done and in actual the things will stay at square one, no progress in any direction.

It is not possible to achieve just with a great initiative from a global corporate. It has to be a joint initiative where each citizen of India will have to play a role. There is a big gap in the living standards, lifestyles and resource availability. The real challenge is to provide an equal opportunity to each and every person. For this bringing all to a level of synchronized thought process is quite important. A positive competition is another factor that needs to be inculcated in each mind. Youth can play a major role in this in bridging the gap between poor and rich, learned and people with less knowledge, educated and uneducated. On one hand we are talking about Big Data, Predictive Analytics, Internet of Things, Cloud Computing and Enterprise Mobility; and on the other hand majority of youth living in remote cities and villages are less privileged to see the technology advancements in metro cities of India.

There are plenty of colleges but still we lack to produce skilled manpower. An engineering degree holder is not fit for an engineer’s job, a doctor fails to handle real life situations after coming out of college despite having excellent grades in the college subjects. Most of the private colleges are yet to be evaluated towards their vested interests – whether their whole gamut is to mint money and befool people or there is some element of seriousness towards their duties and responsibilities of delivering the best possible education along with ample hands-on experience so that right from the day one when the student is out of college, is able to produce the deliverables if given a substantial role in an organization.

During my childhood, I read a story about a blind man carrying a lamp while walking through a zigzag path full of bushes and stones. Someone passing by stopped the blind man and asked him – “What is the purpose of carrying this lamp when you are a blind? It is a useless entity for you”. The blind man smiled and said that the light of the lamp was for others to save them from bushes and stones – for those with light in their eyes. There is a straight lesson from this meaningful story. If I have the capability to see, but if I use it just for my own sake, it is useless. If a blind man can think of delivering something to others despite being less privileged than them, why can’t a privileged person think of delivering to others – in a selfless manner? The day each one of us is able to acquire this mindset, each house will have light and there will be no uneducated left.

There have been some excellent and remarkable initiatives by Indians for Indians. Hole in the Wall, Airtel’s deep penetration to remote villages, a known medical firm’s initiatives to build data of each and every villager in some part of South India are some exemplary ones that are good enough to motivate others to move ahead and generate a spark in every mind of India – whosoever, wherever and whatsoever. If will be a real achievement the day a person who has not even spent a single day in a school is able to call himself DIGITAL citizen of #DigitalIndia