Digitalisation as a Key in Rural Development: Glimpses from India
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Date
2021-06
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Ivane Javakhishvili Tbilisi state university, Faculty of social and political sciences
Abstract
India is an agrarian country. The soul of India lives in its villages. The territory of the country comprises 6,64,369 villages. Approximately 65 % of the population lives in villages. Hence it becomes important to uplift the conditions of these villagers. To achieve this objective, the Government of India need to allocate more funds towards education, civic amenities (especially pure drinking water and management of waste), medical facilities and the policies of economic justice. Many programmes, schemes and projects have been started for the betterment/ upliftment of the living standards of the residents of these villages.
Since last 73 the villagers are lagging behind in most of the sectors including health, education, food and hygiene conditions. The objective of my paper is to seek the answer of the following questions arising in my mind: What is rural development? Why the people from rural are unable to enjoy the equal status with urban area? Why the young generation is moving towards urban area from villagers? What kind of policies, welfare legislations are framed to remove the gap of services between urban and rural area? What kind of special schemes are implemented to raise the living standards of villagers? Why there is ignorance on the part of villagers regarding their rights, schemes implemented for them? What is the role of the Government to ensure that people are not migrating to cities? What is the role of Educational Institutions‟ in improving the living standards of the students belonging to rural area?
Since independence following programmes have been adopted for the empowerment of villagers: Community Development Programme, 1952; Integrated Rural Development Programme, 1979, Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Act 2005.
Advancements of Science and Technology have created an atmosphere of optimism, which led to the coining of phrases, such as Incredible India, India Shining and India 2020. Now let us analyse the role of ICT in rural development. As rural poor are not aware about of their rights and availability of government schemes, ICT can improve their access to the information of their need. ICT creates free flow of information and knowledge of their interest. ICTs help in strengthening Rural Governance by improving transparency, accountability and administrative efficiency of rural institutions. ICT improves interaction within civil society and encourages participation in rural governing process; it will improve the services of their requirement. ICT is regarded as one of the key elements in modernizing agriculture by communicating accurate weather, knowledge of various seeds, fertilisers and information of regarding treatment of diseases of crops.
There is no doubt in narrating that the Government has done a very little for the development of the living standards of these villagers. The policies are not implemented properly. In the era of digitalisation there is no boundary, no caste, no class and no discrimination in the effective implementation of the policies. Time has come to realise the fruits of technology by joining our hands with all the four pillars of the democracy i.e. Parliament, Executive, Judiciary and Media. We need to create proper co-ordination to remove the pitfalls of the policies. We must bring the principle of Polluter Pays the Principle and Precautionary Principle then only we will be able to say that India is shining (Sone Ki Chidiya-a dream of Bapu Ji, the Father of the Nation).
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Keywords
Nationals, rural folk, digitalization, legislations, initiatives and development