NEW DELHI, Aug 16: The union cabinet on Wednesday approved the “PM Vishwakarma” scheme for artisans and craftsmen a day after the Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the scheme during his Independence Day address on Tuesday.
The scheme will have an outlay of ₹ 13,000 crore for five years and cover 18 traditional trades to start with, the union minister for Electronics & Information Technology Ashwini Vaishnaw said. Some 30 lakh people and their families, mainly from the Other Backward Classes (OBC), are likely to benefit from the scheme, said the government.
In the scheme, artisans and craftsmen will be given recognition through the PM Vishwakarma certificate and ID card. They will be provided credit support of up to ₹ 1 lakh (first tranche) and ₹ 2 lakh (second tranche), with a concessional interest rate of 5 per cent. The beneficiaries will also be provided skill upgradation, tool kits, an incentive for digital transactions, and marketing support, an official statement said.
The Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs (CCEA) chaired by PM Modi approved the “PM Vishwakarma” along with other measures.
Those in “PM Vishwakarma” include carpenters, boat makers, blacksmiths, locksmiths, goldsmiths, potters, sculptors, cobblers, and masons, among others. In the meeting, the CCEA also gave green signal to the “PM-eBus Sewa” under which 10,000 e-buses will be added to the country’s fleet and operations will be supported for 10 years, Union Minister Anurag Thakur said.
“10,000 e-buses will be deployed in 169 cities and infrastructure will be upgraded in 181 cities under the Green Urban Mobility Initiatives,” Mr Thakur said.
“The cabinet has approved the “PM-eBus Sewa” to augment city bus operations by 10,000 e-buses on a Private-Public Partnership model. The scheme would have an estimated cost of ₹ 57,613 crore, of which support of ₹ 20,000 crore will be provided by the central government. The scheme will support bus operations for 10 years,” he added.
The scheme will generate 45,000 to 55,000 direct jobs through the deployment of around 10,000 buses in city bus operations, an official statement said. The scheme has two segments – one to augment the city bus services and the other to develop infra under the Green Urban Mobility Initiatives which envisages green initiatives like bus priority, infrastructure, and multimodal interchange facilities among other things, the Centre said.
“Under the scheme, states/cities will be responsible for running the bus services and making payments to the bus operators. The central government will support these bus operations by providing a subsidy,” the statement said. The PM-eBus Sewa will boost e-mobility, the Centre said.
The union cabinet also approved a five-year extension and expansion of the Digital India Programme including an expansion of the Computer Emergency Response Team, India (CERT-in). The expansion of the programme, established in 2015, will have an outlay of ₹14,903 crore, Vaishnaw said.
“This is a five-year outlay starting from 2021-22 to 2025-26,” Vaishnaw said. Officials indicated that this outlay would be over the budget which has already been spent on the programme over the last two years. “We need to build cybersecurity tools for small businesses, schools, hospitals, who have to focus on their work. Cybersecurity should be easily accessible, low cost and affordable,” he said. Under the programme, 6.25 lakh IT professionals will receive upskilling and re-skilling training, and 2.65 lakh employees will receive information security training.
These funds will also be used to improve and modernise the National Knowledge Network (NKN), a high-speed broadband network that was established in 2010 to improve connectivity among educational and research institutions. The Unified Mobile Application for New-age Governance (UMANG) platform, which offers access to about 1,700 government services, will have 540 more services added to it, Vaishnaw announced.
DigiLocker, the online repository operated by the government for official documents, will be expanded to serve Medium, Small and Micro Enterprises, or MSMEs. This will make it easier for them to get verified documents for business loans, Vaishnaw said, adding that this would become a separate application, as business and individual verification processes are different.
The National Supercomputing Mission which has deployed 18 supercomputers, will add nine more such machines. “These supercomputers will have so many applications in weather forecasting, geology, agriculture, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) modeling,” Vaishnaw said. Bhashini, the AI-enabled translation tool created with the support of Microsoft and OpenAI, will be rolled out in all of the 22 languages included in Schedule 8 of the Constitution, he said.
(Manas Dasgupta)