Cabinet okays digital education expansion; cyber awareness courses for 12 crore college students

NEW DELHI : The cabinet today approved the expansion of Digital India project with an outlay of Rs 14,903 crore. Under the extended digital education programme, cyber awareness courses will be introduced for 12 crore college students, 6,25,000 IT professionals will be upskilled and re-skilled and 1,200 startups in tier 2, 3 cities will get support among other add ons to the existing scheme.

The IT professionals will be skilled under the FutureSkills Prime Programme. 2.65 lakh will also get training in information security under the Information Security and Education Awareness (ISEA) programme.

#Cabinet approves expansion of the Digital India programme with an outlay of ₹ 14,903 crore #cabinetbriefings pic.twitter.com/SJ3yTRkXq4

— Rajesh Malhotra (@DG_PIB) August 16, 2023

While 540 additional services will be available now on the Unified Mobile Application for New-age Governance (UMANG) platform, 9 more supercomputers will be added under the National Super Computer Mission.

Besides, the government will roll out Bhashini, an AI-enabled tool for multi-language translation, which is currently available in 10 languages only, in 22 languages included in Schedule 8 of the Constitution including Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kashmiri, Konkani, Malayalam, Manipuri, Marathi, Nepali, Oriya, Punjabi,Sanskrit, Sindhi, Tamil, Telugu, Urdu, Bodo, Santhali, Maithili and Dogri.

Further, the National Knowledge Network (NSN) which connects nearly 1,800 educational institutions will be modernised and three centres of excellence will be established in artificial intelligence on health, agriculture, and sustainable cities.