Minister of Electronics and IT Ravi Shankar Prasad asked the neighboring countries to take a cue from the Indian model of improving governance and empowering the poor through digital initiatives.
Prasad was delivering the Keynote Address at the 10th South Asia Conference on ‘Strengthening Connectivity in South Asia’, organised by the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (IDSA).
Calling India the “home of aspiration population”, Prasad expressed that growth is important, but equity is also equally important. He further added that aspirations of the people in the South Asian region were the same, though they might differ in degree.
Talking about the local mobile manufacturing, the Minister informed that in the last two years, 72 new mobile manufacturing factories have come up in India. More than ten million mobiles have been manufactured and India is becoming a big hub of electronics manufacturing and that Indian companies can also export mobiles to the neighboring and East Asian countries, the minister said.
Speaking on how the recent digital initiatives are changing India, he said that the nation was at the cusp of a big transformation. Earlier, speaking at the inaugural session, IDSA Director General Jayant Prasad noted that connectivity is at the core of regional cooperation and integration, as its key enabler.
An effective road-map for building the regional public goods (RPGs) of connectivity and infrastructure would require four core areas to be addressed — institutional design, financing, sequencing and measurement, he added.
By Baishakhi Dutta
