Digital Economy to target healthcare, administration Smart City first, cost 100 bln rubles a year - minister
NOVO-OGARYOVO. July 5 (Interfax) - Russia's Digital Economy program should start with health care, public administration and the Smart City project, Communications Minister Nikolai Nikiforov said at a meeting chaired by Russian President Vladimir Putin on strategic development and priority projects, which looked at the development of the digital economy.
These are "the first areas where we think this approach is needed" due to the high role played by the state in these areas and their social importance, he said.
But the program will not end there. "The Digital Economy program is not an operative instrument but sets down our goals until 2024 to which we must start moving without delay. And we'll move towards them with an operative instrument, a so-called rolling three-year plan," he said.
Those plans should be approved by the government and adjusted on an annual basis, he said.
"We need a fundamentally new model to implement and fund the program. The current estimate of annual costs under the operative plan, which we still have to draft and approve, is around 100 billion rubles, but a lot of this is already earmarked in federal budget spending," Nikiforov said.
"We need to ring fence spending [on the Digital Economy program] within overall federal budget spending, make this protected expenditure," he said. One of the models currently under discussion is to set up a digital economy development fund, he said.
Nikiforov said the Finance Ministry was "skeptical" about the idea of ring fencing budgeted funds, but there are precedents, for example the Federal Highway Fund.
But additional funding might also be needed, he said.
Nikiforov requested that the program receive general backing and that the government be instructed to approve it.
Industry and Trade Minister Denis Manturov said state support measures for the program ought to be modified.
"In order to stimulate the implementation of the designated solutions in manufacturing processes, we consider it advisable to modify existing measures of support," he said.
"We are working on a means to reconfigure the instrument for subsidizing the production of pilot consignments of equipment where this concerns shifting the emphasis to digitalization," he said.
He also said there were plans to adjust the list of software, the purchase of which his ministry also subsidizes.
This measure currently applies to engineering software but the Industry Ministry thinks it would make sense to extend it to software for industrial internet technologies and to make large high-tech companies eligible for discounts.
"Since for the most part we are talking about new technological solutions, it is vital to decide on a regulatory framework and, of course standards for the markets that are evolving," he said.
