Digitize India Platform

Digitize India Platform (DIP) is an initiative of the Government of India under the Digital India Programme to provide digitization services for scanned document images or physical documents for any organization. The aim is to digitize and make usable all the existing content in different formats and media, languages, digitize and create data extracts for document management, IT applications and records management.

DIP provides an innovative solution by combining machine intelligence and a cost effective crowd sourcing model. It features a secure and automated platform for processing and extracting relevant data from document images in a format that is usable for meta-data tagging, IT application processing and analysis.

Digitize India Platform (DIP) offers an opportunity for government agencies to transform themselves into digital enterprises and for Digital Contributors, rewards for doing simple data entry jobs. It is intended to leverage DIP to lead all organizations towards a paperless office, make data available on demand to the citizens, free archived documents storage spaces and enhance digital public service delivery.

The platform was launched on July 1, 2015 as part of the Digital India programme. The scheme has been discontinued on completion. 

Stakeholders

1. Digital Contributors
   Any Indian citizen with an Aadhaar Number can become a Digital Contributor (DC) and perform simple data entry tasks on the DIP. For every verified and correct task performed, the Contributor will earn reward points. They can redeem the reward points into monetary value or donate them to the Digital India initiative.
2. User Organizations
   Government departments, Public Sector Organization and Autonomous bodies can become an user organization and utilize Digitization Service provided by DIP. A user Organization can submit their records for digitization to platform operator. The records should preferably be in a scanned image format. However, organizations who wish to submit physical records will have to pay for scanning separately.
3. Platform operator (Common Service Centre SPV)
   The platform operator will help in the onboarding of user organization, pre-processing the scanned document images, creating templates for pages being digitized and delivering the digitized data to the user organization. Platform operator will remunerate the Digital Contributors for their earned reward points.

Benefits

1. Government Agencies
   Digitized data extracts generated by DIP will help organizations to:
   
   • Index document images by using the data extracts as meta-data tags
   • Manage, retrieve and access document images more efficiently through keyword based search
   • Use the data extract as automated data inputs in IT applications avoiding manual data entry
   • Safeguard against physical disasters by replicating the data across different media and locations
   • Digitally archive the documents saving space and costs
2. Digital Contributor
   
   • Redeem rewards to generate additional earnings
   • Utilize available time for a meaningful purpose
   • Enhance IT skills
   • Increase employability opportunities
   • Get recognized as a Digital Contributor
   • Earn certificate as a Data Entry Operator
   • Contribute in the building of Digital India

FAQs

1. For Digital Contributors

• What qualifications do I need to become a Digital Contributor?
  There is no lower or upper limit of qualification level to become a Digital Contributor. You need to be literate (read & type) in the language you choose for your data entry tasks.
• How much will I earn by becoming a Digital Champion?
  Your earning is calculated based on the number of correct words you type. You will be assigned one reward point for every character in the correct words. You can redeem every reward point for 2 paisa.
• How many hours can I work in a day?
  There is no limit on the number of hours you can work in a day. You can work anytime from anywhere as long as the tasks are available in your selected language, you have a computing device (like a desktop or laptop, tablet or smart mobile phone) and an internet connection.

2. For Agencies

• What type of documents can I digitize using DIP?
  You can digitize any document image that is human readable and has a defined structure like a printed form or a register with defined rows & columns. However it is suggested that you digitize only those documents which are generated in high volume, have a similar document structure and need frequent access.

• What type of data can I extract from the documents?
  DIP can process and extract multi-lingual text, numeric and alphanumeric data from the document images.
• How does DIP ensure the Data quality and accuracy?
  DIP uses multiple levels of quality checks for verification and validation of the data. It uses image validation technique to ensure that only similar types of documents are processed in a batch. It uses pre-defined field level validations to ensure correct data type entered by the crowd workforce and multi-level data value comparisons through a maker-checker process for data accuracy and quality check. Human validation is used for data fields that fail the automated quality checks. In future DIP will be using pre-defined data dictionaries and machine learning algorithms for higher levels of data accuracy and quality.
• How does DIP ensure Data privacy and security?
  
  • DIP is hosted on NIC's secure cloud infrastructure "Meghraj" that provides restricted access only to authorized personnel.
  • The data transmission from the cloud to the crowd is secured through industry standard encryption algorithms and protocols like SSL and HTTPS.
  • The data from the documents is distributed to the crowd in fragments through a randomization algorithm that ensures that no individual gets more than a fixed number of randomly assigned fields making it difficult to identify the type of the data or the document.
  • The data extracts generated for an organization can be accessed only by authorized personnel of the organization with system assigned ids and passwords.
  • The identity and authentication of the crowd agents is done through Aadhar number using the UIDAI database and every crowd agent is assigned a unique user id and password.
  • The system maintains an audit log of all the transactions including login details, locations, machine id etc. and will soon have a fraud engine to monitor suspicious transactions.
• How do I get started on DIP?
  
  • Identify the documents you need to digitize.
  • Verify their format to check that they are similar
  • Estimate the volume of documents you need to digitize
  • Verify the image quality to check that they are human readable
  • Identify the data fields per document you need to extract
  • Register as a department on the Digitize India portal or mail the information to support.dip[at]gov.in, helpdesk[at]csclive.in@

Source : MeitY