Five ways in which Finance Minister Arun Jaitley plans to leverage technology for a better India

While presenting the Union Budget for 2017-18 in the Parliament on Wednesday, finance minister Arun Jaitley used the term technology only four times. This is much lesser than previous Budgets where the term technology came up several times over. But there is nothing to be disappointed since the term "digital" seems to be the flavour of the season with close to 30 mentions during the two hour long speech. Here's a look at some of the areas in which the government plans to leverage technology or digital infrastructure.

# While the budget provision of Rs. 38,500 crore under the job gaurantee scheme MGNREGA has been increased to Rs. 48,000 crores in 2017-18. Jaitley said that
space technology is being used in a big way to plan MGNREGA works. Also, the initiative to geo-tag all MGNREGA assets and putting them in public domain has established greater transparency.

# Information technology will be leveraged to launch the SWAYAM platform that will enable students to virtually attend over 350 courses taught by the best faculty; access high quality reading resources; participate in discussion forums; take tests and earn academic grades. Access to SWAYAM would be widened by linkage with DTH channels, dedicated to education.

# While the allocation under the National optical fibre network project BharatNet has been increased to Rs. 10,000 crores in 2017-18. By the end of 2017-18, high speed broadband connectivity on is expected to be available in more than 1,50,000 gram panchayats, with wifi hot spots and access to digital services at low tariffs.

# A DigiGaon initiative will be launched to provide tele-medicine, education and skills through digital technology across a set of villages in the country through high speed broadband.

# Technology is being used in a big way by the Income Tax department to remove human contact with assesses as well as to plug tax avoidance. The government will try to maximise its efforts for e-assessment in the coming year and will deploy data mining capability, both in-house and outsourced.