The government is upgrading its electronic messaging service to a more secure network. The national informatics centre (NIC), its information technology arm, will migrate all services on ‘mail.nic.in’ and ‘mail.gov.in’ to ‘email.gov.in’. So in a few months all official email accounts and data will migrate to gov.in domain. The new domain, amon
As the telecom sector is mired in financial, regulatory and competition hurdles, and consumers are grappling with poor quality of services and connectivity, the government and the regulator are drafting a slew of policy initiatives to provide redress. The department of telecommunications (DoT) plans to unveil a new telecom policy (NTP) by the end of this year. The telecom regulatory authority o
Central Public Works Department (CPWD) will now be using an electronic measurement book (e-MB) that will help it to keep a tab on its various projects. The e-MB will enable reporting of progress of works online as per the schedule of agreement with contractors based on which payments will be made. e-MB has been made mandatory from the first of next month doing away
Why would Google develop self-driving cars? Google first had web search, search led to local search, which led to maps, maps led to street views, and street view led to data on everything around that. In the meantime, machine learning became powerful. It started identifying objects on the road, and all this led to self-driving cars. Fundamentally, when you have massive data pool you c
A 10 percent increase in India’s internet traffic leads to, on average, a 3.3 percent increase in India’s GDP, and a 10 percent increase in India’s mobile internet traffic leads to a 1.3 percent increase in the GDP, says a study, ‘Estimating the value of new generation internet based applications in India’, by the Indian Council for Research on International Econom
India may not take a heavy-handed approach in regulating cloud computing. The telecom regulatory authority of India (TRAI) is expected to submit its recommendations on cloud computing to the department of telecommunications (DoT) in the next couple of months, says an official aware of the matter. In its submission, the regulator is considering industry-friendly rules governing cloud technology
A project worth Rs 1,000 crore by the department of post will serve as a shot in the arm for financial inclusion in the country. The department, say officials aware of the matter, has zeroed in on the US-based Hewlett Packard (HP) to set up the technology infrastructure for its countrywide rollout of a payment bank – a stripped-down version of a bank that would allow a limited savings dep
We started in July 2009 with two overarching contexts. The first context was identification. Many people did not have any identification document. Of course, there are many ID documents in India, but there was no single universal document, and even after adding up the existing ones there was no universal coverage. For example, the voter ID card is meant only for those above 18 years o
The ministry of communications is working on a new application-driven telecom policy as opposed to the National Telecom Policy (NTP), 2012 which was connectivity driven, said minister Manoj Sinha. Speaking at a seminar titled ‘ICT: engendering new governance structure’, he said that the new policy should focus on end users and should look for o
A few years ago, a public sector undertaking (PSU) in the manufacturing sector took part in a power plant’s contract bidding. It lost the contract to a Chinese firm. Most Chinese companies are known for their aggressive bidding, as they quote the lowest. They have been giving nightmares to many Indian PSUs, and private sector companies, for over ten years, by outbidding them in various te
In April, the Institute of Chemical Technology (ICT), Mumbai was making news. Its ranking in the National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF) 2017 dropped from the second position to 25th. In the same month, the institute was again trending, for another reason. A mischief by a group of third and fourth year undergraduate students not only surprised the top management of the institute but als
The emerging sentience of Artificial Intelligence (AI) scares many. Those who are afraid of it are saying all of us should be. Behind that dire prognosis is something so fundamentally primeval that its sheer rawness erodes the carefully applied layers of sophistry and civilisation by generations of humanity. AI is intelligent in the same way that we consider someone else intelligent. Ye
Capturing the growing influence of the internet on the education industry in India, Google and KPMG have released a joint report titled, ‘Online Education in India: 2021. The report reveals that the online education industry will grow at a healthy rate of eight times, to become a USD1.96 billion industry by 2021. The report is based on a comprehensiv
The government has sanctioned 111 posts of cyber security professionals for the Indian computer emergency response team (ICERT) under the ministry of electronics and information technology (MEITY), according to a ministry official, who added that the posts were sanctioned earlier this year. The recruitment for the ICERT has been pending for at least five years and it is expe
Sameer Srivastava, a school topper from Meerut in Uttar Pradesh, wanted to study in an IIT like any other engineering aspirant. But getting into an institution where only less than one percent of the applicants are selected was a big hurdle. Not cutting the IIT mark, Sameer decided to settle for an engineering college, which with its traditional curriculum and teachers was just good eno
Privacy and data protection concerns have become serious in a digital world due to ease of search and aggregation, with or without Aadhaar. Type any name in Google and it will throw up thousands of results, giving data/information publicly available. Hence, the responsibility falls on organisations which collect data from individuals to protect it. If a state government puts bank account detail
It’s a hot and dull afternoon. The streets of Mohali district in Punjab are almost empty. The dullness is also reflected inside the Mohali Sewa Kendra. Except for four women there is nobody inside the centre. Wearing uniformed pale blue salwar kameez and an orange dupatta, the women are quietly working behind their counters. The silence is disrupted every now and then with a sudden clatte
It’s common knowledge that banks thrive on interest spread, the difference between the rate they charge borrowers and the rate they pay depositors. Bank profits hinge on those vital two to five percentage points, besides small service charges for cheque books, ATM transactions and so on. Enter a paradox: banks which accept deposits but do not lend. So, are they viable? That
Mozilla is working on two separate goals in net neutrality. One is to bring everyone online; ensure that everyone has access to the internet. The other is to ensure that the network should remain open and diverse. We want people to have access to the whole diversity of the internet and not just in some parts. The debate on neutrality has been playing in India for two years in a more dev
As one enters the State Senior Secondary School, Kalyana, in Kangra district – some 15 km from Dharamsala – one sees children from different age groups scattered all across the playground. In the basketball court, boys and girls, wearing maroon sweaters, sitting in separate rows are taking an exam. A short distance from there a class is underway for standard 6 students. Some
