Digital India and e Governance Initiatives

SWAYAM, Study Webs of Active Learning for Young Aspiring Minds, is the Government of India's massive open online course platform, hosting courses from the ninth standard through to post-graduation, prepared by faculty across the country and delivered free of cost, with a nominal fee only for proctored examination and certification. It is complemented by the SWAYAM Prabha direct-to-home educational television channels. The aim as stated in option (d), affordable and quality education to citizens for free, is therefore correct.

• Option (a) describes the self help group and rural livelihoods architecture, which runs through the National Rural Livelihoods Mission.
• Option (b) describes start-up support under Startup India and the Fund of Funds.
• Option (c) describes the adolescent girls programmes, SABLA and later schemes under the umbrella of women and child development. The name itself supplies a partial route for a candidate who recalls the expansion, since the words 'active learning' and 'young aspiring minds' point unmistakably to education, and the acronym is the government's own, which is why the item sits at moderate rather than difficult.

• Statement 1 is correct. DigiLocker is a cloud-based document repository provided by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology as one of the flagship components of the Digital India programme, linked to the user's Aadhaar number, in which issuing authorities may place documents directly and requesting agencies may verify them.
• Statement 2 is correct and states the defining benefit of the service: because the documents sit in the cloud rather than in a physical file, they can be accessed from anywhere with a network connection, which is what makes the system useful at all. Both statements being correct, the answer is (c).
• Options (a) and (b) each reject one true proposition, and (d) rejects both. There is no trap here and no qualifier doing hidden work, so the item is easy for any candidate who has encountered the service; the wider principle is simply that documents issued into a digital repository under section 9A of the Information Technology Act and the associated rules carry the same legal standing as the original physical documents.

• Statement 1 is incorrect. Smart India Hackathon has no connection with the Smart Cities Mission beyond the shared word 'smart', which is the entire basis of the distractor. It is not a centrally sponsored scheme and it does not develop cities.
• Statement 2 is correct. Smart India Hackathon is a nationwide product development competition in which student teams work on problem statements posted by central ministries, departments and, in later editions, industry, with the object of surfacing digital technology solutions to identified governance problems.
• Statement 3 is incorrect. Complete digitisation of financial transactions is the ambition associated with the Digital India programme and with the post demonetisation cashless economy push, not with a hackathon. Both statements 1 and 3 fail on the same defect, that each attaches a large national mission to what is a competition, and both are additionally implausible in claiming to cover 'every city' and 'all financial transactions' within a decade. Rejecting either eliminates three options, leaving (b). Governing principle: absolute quantifiers such as every, all and completely in a scheme description are almost always the mark of a manufactured statement.

• Statement 1 is incorrect. Digital India is built on nine pillars, among them broadband highways, universal access to mobile connectivity, the public internet access programme, e governance, e Kranti, information for all, electronics manufacturing, information technology for jobs and early harvest programmes. Creating domestic substitutes for foreign internet companies on the Chinese model is not among them; the Chinese pattern rests on excluding foreign platforms from the market, which India has never adopted as policy.
• Statement 2 is incorrect. Compulsory or encouraged domestic location of data centres, that is data localisation, formed no part of the Digital India design.
• Statement 3 is correct and is the least ambitious sounding of the three, which is the trap: BharatNet aims to connect gram panchayats with optical fibre, and the public internet access programme provides for common service centres and Wi Fi in schools, public places and tourist centres. Elimination route: statement 1 can be rejected on the model it invokes, since Digital India nowhere adopts a Chinese style closed internet, and once (a) and (d) fall the choice reduces to whether data localisation was an aim, which it was not.

Hence (b).

• Statement 1 is incorrect. Participation in the Mission is voluntary for health facilities and health professionals; hospitals in both the public and private sectors choose whether to register in the Health Facility Registry, and no compulsion to adopt exists.
• Statement 2 is incorrect for the same reason applied to individuals. Creation of an ABHA health account and the linking of records to it rest on the consent of the individual, and the Mission's own design places consent and the right to withdraw at the centre. The universal health coverage objective does not translate into an obligation for every citizen to enrol, and the word should in the statement is what makes it fail.
• Statement 3 is correct. The architecture of federated registries and a consent based health information exchange is built precisely so that a person's records can be accessed by an authorised provider anywhere in the country, which is the portability the Mission claims. Only statement 3 holds, giving (b), and options (a), (c) and (d) each admit a compulsion that the scheme does not impose.

• Statement 1 is correct. The programme, launched in 2008 as the National Land Records Modernisation Programme and revamped as a central sector scheme from April 2016, is funded entirely by the Central Government, unlike the earlier centrally sponsored arrangement with State cost sharing.
• Statement 2 is correct. Digitisation of cadastral maps, that is the survey maps showing plot boundaries, is a core component alongside computerisation of the Records of Rights and of the registration process.
• Statement 3 is correct. A transliteration initiative has been undertaken to render Records of Rights from the local language into the other languages recognised in the Eighth Schedule, using automated tools, so as to serve citizens across linguistic regions. Since none can be excluded, (d) is correct and options (a), (b) and (c) each drop a true component.
• Statement 3 is the least familiar and is the reason the question is not trivially easy.