All government and private department and industries have acutely felt the need for digitisation in the information and technology era. With the need to share information fast and error free, it needs to be coded into a form, which can be sent over a digital channel. “Digitisation has not just economical but social impact as well: for example the election process, census collection process and UID, which have changed people’s lives in India,” said N Ravi Shankar, CMD, Bharat Broadband Network Limited (BBNL) and additional secretary & administrator USOF.

He was speaking at the national seminar on 'office automation and imaging industry: digital documentation 2.0 revolutionising India Inc.' organised by the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) in New Delhi on Friday.

Shankar said that documentation process leads to better governance and that digital documentation thus is the need of the hour. He also said that with the high penetration of mobile in India, the choice is clearly in favour of going digital to connect with the people. “With mobile becoming ubiquitous, a single device will soon become our one-stop-shop for all information. In such a scenario, digital documentation will not only supply a lot of data but also business opportunities,” he said.

He said that for a seamless and smooth digital era experience, six Cs would have to be overcome: connectivity, cost of devises, content on the network, competitive tariff, computer literacy and community and citizen participation.

Renu Budhiraja, senior director & HoD state data centres, e-governance division, department of electronics and IT (DeitY), said a lot of digitisation in going on in the back-end processes of all the e-governance projects in India. “We need to develop the standards of digitisation, scanning, storing and also make sure that the data recorded is able to talk to each other,” she said.

Budhiraja said that integration and interoperability of data is important because India is soon heading towards an integrated government.

Dr C Muralikrishna Kumar, senior advisor, planning commission, said that India needs to improve in the areas of individual usage of digital equipment, content creation in local language and improvement of the business innovation environment to better leverage the digital potential of the country. “Digitisation by 10 percentage points can improve the GDP by 0.97 percent and decrease the unemployment rate by 1.02 percent,” he said while elaborating on the rewards of digitisation in India.

Rajesh Gupta, director IT, directorate general of supplies and disposals (DGS&D), informed the gathering that his department is an end-to-end procurement channel, which is responsible for not only procurement of products for the government but also their quality assurance. It is amongst the few e-procurement channels in the country where all processes, right from tender document to project award, are undertaken online. “This is possible due to exclusive digitisation of the department and infrastructure which makes transferring digital data possible,” said Gupta.