New Delhi: Ravi Shankar Prasad, who won his first-ever Lok Sabha election from Bihar this year, is all set for a second consecutive stint as the Minister for Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY).
He has also been handed over the charge of the crucial communications ministry, which he handled between 2014 and 2016 before it was given to BJP leader Manoj Sinha.
The charge of these two ministries presents a high-profile, challenging brief for Prasad: While MeitY oversees PM Modi’s pet digitisation initiatives, the communications ministry looks after a sector that is being bled by heavy competition.
The two departments used to function as one ministry until 2016, when the department of electronics and information technology was carved out into a separate portfolio.
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‘An OK job’
A day before the portfolios were announced, a senior MeitY official told ThePrint that Prasad had done an “OK job as minister”.
While MeitY may not be as important as the big four ministries, Defence, Home, Finance and External, its performance is more evident from day to day because of the largescale impact IT services have.
“The IT ministry is important because the services it discharges are cost-effective and highly-efficient solutions… able to impact millions of lives in a short time span,” the MeitY official said.
Among other things, MeitY oversees the technological backbone of Aadhaar, the Unique ID meant to ease enrolment and registration across different platforms, and the Common Services Centres scheme, which aims to provide “high quality and cost-effective video, voice and data content and services, in the areas of e-governance, education, health, telemedicine, entertainment as well as other private services” to rural India.
Primarily, however, the ministry spearheads Digital India, one of the flagship initiatives of the Modi government that aims to bolster transparency and ease of different transactions.
Prasad said of Digital India in a December 2018 MeitY report, “The programme has transformed the entire digital profile of the country, with 123 crore Aadhaar, 120 crore mobile phones, 49 crore internet subscriptions and a network of 3.12 lakh Common Services Centres. Today Digital India is transforming the lives of millions of Indians, giving them services in the remotest part of India…”
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Dropped for non-performance
Sinha, who served as Minister of Communications (Independent charge) in Modi 1.0, has been dropped from the government altogether.
The BJP leader lost the Lok Sabha election from Ghazipur, UP, to a BSP rival, and his performance as minister had reportedly left a lot to be desired.
According to an IANS report, he was seen as having mishandled the telecom crisis, and failed to complete the Digital India project BharatNet, which seeks to bring gram panchayats on the internet map.