Riding on the success of Digital India has breached the global technology paradox. The new age technology transition and its mass adoption is a phenomena that BigTechs are vying not just to tap the huge India market but also use it as a springboard to replicate it as, ‘technology sandbox of the world.’
Backing India’s ‘Viksit Bharat 2047′ vision’, global technology major, Amazon Web Services (AWS), has announced that key government flagship projects including the National Health Authority (NHA), Government e-Marketplace (GeM), and Public Sector Bank Alliance (PSBA) are adopting AWS technology to build innovative, scalable, and secure solutions to drive India’s digital transformation journey.
“India’s public sector is laying the foundation to achieve the government’s vision of a Viksit Bharat 2047, by developing population-scale initiatives, building on cloud and AI technology. Transformative innovations in government, healthcare, and education segments for example are strengthening India’s potential as a Digital Nation, and to become a technology sandbox for the world,” Pankaj Gupta, Leader – Public Sector, AWS India said at a recent event.
According to Gupta, enabled by AWS Covin, the world’s largest COVID vaccination system that has done more than 2.2 billion vaccinations or 1.2 billion registrations, is the world’s fastest growing tech platform. “We all know the COVID is over, but the good news for COVID is that it is getting integrated with other health platforms like reproductive science health, maternal science health and getting evolved into something called universal immunization platform,” Gupta said while outlining the role of AWS in the Indian technology story.
Gupta maintained that the Union government was looking to add 12 more vaccines like Theria, BCG, Tecna, Polio to the same platform. “Every year in India, there are 100 million children between the age of 0 to 6 years Pregnant women, lactating mothers, who needs to be vaccinated…” he said adding that going forward, the tech platform will help in creating digital vaccination record, longitudinal health record of a child from the day of its birth to check problems like malnutrition.
Betting big on India, Amazon.com, Chief Technology Officer, Werner Vogels said that enterprises from India were seeking ways to maximise cloud investments to minimise waste. “This is especially crucial in India, where the challenge is to build scalable, efficient digital systems serving 1.4 billion people… I am inspired by how builders and organisations in India are poised to embrace these principles, creating innovative solutions that not only address immediate challenges but also lay the foundation for sustainable, long-term growth,” Vogels said.
Hosting India’s digital future
The role AWS technology has seen a rapid rise in smooth implementation of key government flagship projects including:
National Skill Development Corporation: NSDC runs its citizen-scale skilling platform called Skill India Digital Hub (SIDH) on AWS. SIDH is intended to serve 800 million users across India to create a skilled workforce, and contribute towards the government’s goal of a fully developed India.
Swachh Bharat Mission: The Swachchata App by the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA) is a mobile-based grievance redressal application, supporting the Government of India’s Swachh Bharat Mission. It uses advanced AWS technologies for powering real-time geographic information system (GIS), analytics-based dashboards, business intelligence, Internet-of-Things (IoT), and drone-based monitoring of sanitation assets.
Co-WIN: These examples showcase continued innovation of national platforms on AWS. Besides powering Co-WIN, enabling seamless registration, real-time vaccination status tracking, and certificate generation for millions, AWS also powers DigiLocker, which provides citizens anytime and anywhere access to authentic digital documents.
Apart from this AWS has also announced that PSB Alliance Private Limited (PSBA) has empanelled AWS as a cloud service provider to offer cloud computing services to India’s public sector banks. PSBA is an umbrella organisation of 12 public sector banks and acts as a nodal body to deliver end-to-end technology-enabled banking services.
Empowering GeM to build the world’s largest public procurement platform
The Government e-Marketplace (GeM)—the world’s second largest public procurement platform—is also using AWS for its robust, scalable, and secure cloud infrastructure. GeM enables transparency, efficiency, and inclusivity in the public procurement domain (both goods and services) by government organisations and the public sector. Powered by AWS cloud services, GeM enables 9,000 page views per second, 1.5 million interactions each day, and a daily transaction average of nearly Rs 1,000 crore in gross merchandise value.
GeM has a technology vision to digitise, automate, and transform its platform to improve efficiency, and enhance user experience, and is deploying artificial intelligence (AI) and generative AI to provide customer-centric services and enable users to take data-driven decisions.
Driving digital health ecosystem
Backed by AWS, the National Health Authority (NHA) is building an open digital health ecosystem to integrate digital health infrastructure and provide health coverage to more than 550 million citizens through —Ayushman Bharat-Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana (AB-PMJAY) and Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission (ABDM).
The NHA modules of the AB-PMJAY programme including Beneficiary Identification System, Transaction Management System that manages beneficiary identification, and claim transaction management is said to be one of its kind of tech platforms that can be scaled to cater to entire 1.4 billion population. As per government data so far more than 354 million Ayushman cards have been issued with more than 30 thousand hospitals empaneled, and more than 68 million hospitalisations covered by PMJAY across 25 states and 8 union territories.
