Digital India Awards
Digital India Awards honour innovative digital governance initiatives.
They promote inclusion, transparency, and citizen empowerment.
Category Thematic Areas
The New Oil: Critical and Rare Earth Minerals, their Emerging Geopolitics and India’s Strategic Crossroads
Critical minerals, from lithium and cobalt to rare earth elements, have become linchpins of the modern economy. They are the new oil of the twenty-first century for electric vehicles, semiconductors, solar panels, wind turbines, and advanced batteries and are critical for not only clean energy but also medical, defence, and aerospace. Critical minerals are also crucial for developing the digital and the green economy. But what are critical minerals exactly?
BioCARe Programme 2011: Empowering Women in Biotechnology Research
The Biotechnology Career Advancement and Re-orientation (BioCARe) Programme is a targeted initiative by the Department of Biotechnology (DBT), under the Ministry of Science & Technology, Government of India. The programme started with an objective to enhance the presence of female researchers in Biotechnology and allied areas in the country. BioCare provides sanctioned extramural research funding to unemployed female researchers.
Digitizing Informality: A Policy Update on the e-Shram Portal, 2021
According to the ILO (2020), around 90 percent of India’s workforce is engaged in the unorganized sector, which absorbs most of the internal migrants.
The 2011 Census enumerated 450 million internal migrants, and this is estimated to increase to 600 million by 2021. Therefore, creating a comprehensive, accurate, and accessible database was the need of the hour. In May 2021, the Supreme Court directed the Union government to build a national database of unorganized workers.
Fostering Inclusivity in Communication Technology: Knowledge and Resource Centre for Accessibility in ICT (KAI), 2022
The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) launched the KAI project, led by C-DAC Pune, to develop national ICT accessibility standards and make digital technology more inclusive for persons with disabilities in India.
Rethinking Groundwater Management in India: A Policy Update on Atal Bhujal Yojana, 2020
Groundwater is a significant source of freshwater and is crucial for domestic, agricultural, and industrial purposes. However, unchecked extraction, overexploitation, and contamination pose serious threats to its sustainability
Maternity Benefit (Amendment) Act, 2017: A Right Delayed, A Policy Denied
The Maternity Benefit (Amendment) Act, 2017 has been a significant milestone in India’s Labor welfare framework, especially for the women working in the formal sector. In order to amend the already existing 1961 legislation, the Act extends paid maternity leave from 12 to 26 weeks for women with less than two surviving children.