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With large e-governance initiatives and projects such as the National Knowledge Network being rolled out across the country, the Union Budget has proposed a total outlay of about Rs 3,619 crore for Department of IT in 2011-12.
This is higher than about Rs 3,066 crore allocated to the Department in the last Budget, but lower than the revised estimates of about Rs 3,875 crore for 2010-11.
Overall, the Plan outlay for DIT would focus on schemes relating to infrastructure development (which includes e-governance project), the National Knowledge Network (NKN), as well as allocations for National Informatics centres, R&D programmes, C-DAC and Human Resource development among others.
Knowledge network
A look of Expenditure Budget document shows that NKN – a project to connect knowledge institutions across India on a high speed backbone – has got a budgetary allocation of Rs 225 crore for fiscal 2012 compared to Budgetary allocation of Rs 90 crore and revised allocation of Rs 1,225 crore for fiscal 2011.
When contacted, a senior IT official told Business Line that the Department will be seeking additional funds for next fiscal as the project progresses.
“The core backbone should be set up in the first two years (of the project implementation) and therefore you will see a high expenditure during the first two years,” he said.
In fact, the Finance Minister, Mr Pranab Mukherjee, in his Budget speech on Monday had stated that NKN, which was approved in March 2010, will link-up 1,500 institutes of higher learning and research through an optical fibre backbone.
“During the current year, 190 institutes will be connected to NKN. Since the core will be ready by March 2011, the connectivity to all 1500 institutions will be provided by March 2012,” he had said.
Unique identification
Besides the allocation for projects and schemes under the IT Department, the Union Budget has separately pegged the outlay for the ambitious Unique Identification Authority of India (implementing the Aadhaar project) at Rs 1,470 crore for fiscal 2012, against Budget allocation of Rs 1,900 crore earmarked for fiscal 2011.
However, the revised estimate for fiscal 2011 stood at Rs 960 crore, according to the Expenditure Budget.
The allocation for fiscal 2012 would be utilised towards enrolment support and ICT assistance to registrars, building of back-end infrastructure including data centres, and awareness campaign, a senior UID official said.
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