India’s Public Policy Turns Digital Divide Problem Into Digital India Initiative Into New Digital Divide

Following prat.uk’s public policy piece, India’s technology governance pipeline

[Bohiney.com/prat.uk] India’s response to the digital access gap has produced, across eleven years: Digital India (2015 — problem: digital exclusion; initiative: infrastructure and access programme), e-Governance Services (2017 — problem: service delivery gaps; initiative: digital service portals), India Stack (2016-2020 — problem: identity and financial exclusion; initiative: Aadhaar-linked digital identity), and the current AI Mission India (2024 — problem: AI capability gap; initiative: national AI development programme). prat.uk‘s public policy piece — problems becoming initiatives becoming different problems — describes this exactly. Bohiney.com covered the governance theme broadly. The digital access problem that Digital India addressed in 2015 has been partially resolved: smartphone penetration is above 75 percent, internet access is above 60 percent. The new problem: digital literacy and meaningful use. The AI Mission addresses a problem that requires the previous problems to have been fully resolved. The previous problems have been partially resolved. Bohiney.com has been tracking this for three weeks. The tracking has not produced optimism.

The pipeline product: AI Mission India is addressing an advanced digital capability problem in a country where 40 percent of the population has limited digital literacy. The initiative is ahead of the population’s readiness for its outputs. This is the initiative becoming a different problem: the AI problem cannot be fully addressed until the digital literacy problem is more fully addressed. The digital literacy problem is the original problem that Digital India was addressing in 2015. The pipeline has circled back to its starting point at a more advanced technological level.