Category Center for ICT for Development

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Ease of Living Index (2018): Assessing Urban Governance and Quality of Life in Indian Cities

The Ease of Living Index (EoLI) is a Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA) assessment tool designed to help Indian cities evaluate themselves against global and national benchmarks and to encourage a shift toward outcome-based urban planning and management. MoHUA launched the first edition on August 13, 2018, describing it at the time as more than just a ranking exercise, an open and participatory assessment combining self-reported data with physical audits of urban metrics, intended to create a baseline for evidence-based urban policy debate (PIB, 2018).

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Mobile Phone Manufacturing Scheme 2026

The Make India Initiative has propelled electronics manufacturing to grow 7 times and exports to grow 11 times since FY 2014-15. The electronics manufacturing sector has also emerged as a significant source of employment, with a few plants employing more than 5,000 employees at a single location. (MeitY, 2026)

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Gyan Bharatam: Building a Digital Knowledge Infrastructure for India’s Manuscript Heritage

India possesses a vast and diverse manuscript heritage covering fields such as philosophy, literature, medicine, mathematics, astronomy, arts, governance and other knowledge traditions. These manuscripts are dispersed across libraries, academic institutions, museums, temples, monasteries, private collections and individual custodians, making their systematic identification, preservation and accessibility a major institutional challenge. Government sources have estimated India's manuscript corpus in the range of 5–10 million manuscripts, highlighting the scale of the task involved in creating a comprehensive national inventory (Ministry of Culture, 2026).

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Drone Shakti Initiative 2022 and India’s Drone Policy Ecosystem: Assessing Innovation, Employment and Commercial Drone Adoption (2021–2026)

In just one budget cycle India's drone industry went from the fringes of civil aviation policy to an official driver of Aatmanirbhar Bharat. The turning point was the new liberalised Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) Rules, 2021, by the Ministry of Civil Aviation notifying on 25 August 2021 which replaced the compliance-heavy Civil Aviation Requirements of 2018 with a lighter framework, where security clearance was not required, type certificates were not required, import clearances were not required, and several other approvals were eliminated, and where close to 90 per cent of Indian airspace was declared as ‘green zones'’ where drone flights up to 400 feet will be allowed without case-by-case permission.

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Governing AI Responsibly : The Safe & Trusted AI Pillar (2024)

As AI systems become embedded in healthcare, finance, education, and governance, the risks they carry algorithmic bias, deepfakes, privacy violations, and opaque decision-making  grow alongside their benefits. The Safe & Trusted AI pillar was designed as the IndiaAI Mission's governance and risk-management layer, ensuring that the capabilities built through the other six pillars develop within an accountable, rights-respecting framework.

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Funding India’s AI Startups – Assessing IndiaAI Startup Financing Pillar (2024)

Foundation models, national compute infrastructure, and sovereign datasets alone cannot sustain India's AI ambitions without a parallel mechanism to fund the startups building on top of them. The IndiaAI Startup Financing pillar was conceived to fill this gap — supporting deep-tech AI startups with streamlined access to capital, given the capital-intensive, long-gestation nature of AI product development compared to conventional software startups.

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