People at the bottom of the pyramid should be at the core of digitisation, Minister of Communications, and Electronics and Information Technology Ashwini Vaishnaw said, adding efforts are on to augment manufacturing of electronics and spread digitisation in the country.

Addressing a session on “Leverage Digital Platforms to Build a Future-Ready India” at ‘Sankalp Se Siddhi’ Summit on Saturday in New Delhi, Vaishnaw highlighted the five themes or points that can add value to development efforts of the government and industry pertaining to digitisation.

These included electronics and other kinds of manufacturing; lead in the semiconductor sector; use of public digital platforms, and convergence between telecom and information technology to reap benefits of digitisation.

Talking about the growth made by electronics manufacturing in the last decade, the IT Minister said that the electronics industry has made significant growth in the last 7-10 years. It has grown to a $80 billion industry, employing around 25 lakh (25,00,000) people and it’s well on its way to grow to a $300 billion industry in the coming years.

Lot of inputs have been received from the industry for further increasing the growth of this industry and the government is in the process of implementing many of these suggestions.

Speaking on the potential of the semiconductor sector, the Electronics & IT Minister said that the sector is the foundation stone for many industries, including telecom, IT hardware, automobile, steel and heavy machinery.

“Our aim,” he said, “is to leverage our talent and build up the semiconductor industry in our country and scale it up in a consistent manner in the next 10 to 15 years.”

He mentioned that the government has undertaken some forward-looking initiatives in this regard, which are getting good response from the industry.

According to the Minister, the government will soon bring a National Data Framework and the non-personal data of people will be used for providing better services to them.

Talking about the convergence of telecom (4G/5G services) and the digital world, Vaishnaw said that mobile phones are the primary mode of consumption of digital services.

“We should think on the lines of how we can accelerate this transition towards digitisation and at the same time how to make it safer given the challenge of cyber security,” he observed.

The multi-stakeholder summit ‘Sankalp Se Siddhi’ is being organized by the Confederation of Indian Industry (Cll) and India@75 Foundation jointly with the Ministry of Culture to commemorate India’s 75th year of Independence.