Digital India programme to offer passport, pension online

Government is implementing the Digital India programme to transform the country into a digitally empowered and knowledge economy so that various services like passport, pension and driving licenses could be delivered online, Lok Sabha was informed today.
Telecom and IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said one of the primary focus areas of Digital India is Pillar 5: eKranti - electronic delivery of services.
"e-Kranti aims to ensure a government wide transformation by delivering all services electronically to the citizens through integrated and interoperable systems via multiple modes while ensuring efficiency, transparency and reliability of such services at affordable costs," he said during Question Hour.

In e-Kranti, 44 Mission Mode Projects (MMP) - 13 central, 17 state and 14 integrated MMPs - are being implemented. Under the 25 operational MMPs 222 services are being provided. More than 192 e-transactions have been reported since January 1, 2016.
"Under e-Kranti, the government of India has made concerted effort to make offline government services to be also delivered through online mode, ensuring that all citizens would have access to them, thereby improving the quality of basic governance on an unprecedented scale," he said.
Prasad said services being provided online include income tax, passport, immigration, core banking, pension grievance redressal, courts, police, RTI, utility payments, licenses, social welfare schemes, agriculture, municipality, land record, vehicle registration, driving license, public distribution system etc.

The Minister said so far more than 100 crore Aadhaar enrollments have been processed and that resulted in extensive use of Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) scheme for subsidies and saving of Rs 21,000 crore.

Prasad said around 1.99 lakh common service centres have been made operational and 1,40,751 KMs OFC pipe laid and over 1,12 lakh KMs optical fibre laid for connectivity to 50,465 gram panchayats to deliver services to citizens in rural areas.
Replying to another question, Minister of State for
PMO Jitendra Singh said as per Section 2 of the Atomic Energy Act 1962, no private players have been issued licenses for production of monazite or processing for extracting thorium or the export of these minerals.

"India as a policy does not export rare earth minerals to any country," he said in Lok Sabha during Question Hour.
Singh, however, said small amount of Monazite is being exported to Japan due to diplomatic reasons.
Monazite is a reddish-brown phosphate mineral containing rare earth metals.