Digital Economy national project: subsidies for enterprises, free IT training and turbo Internet

1,6 trillion rubles for national project

Before analysing the implementation of the digital economy in Tatarstan, we should remind what Digital Economy of the Russian Federation national project is.

It includes six federal projects: Regulation of Digital Environment, Staff for Digital Economy, Information Infrastructure, Information Security, Digital Technologies and Digital State Management. There is no direct financing for most measures of federal projects of Digital Economy from the federal budget.

“The total volume of financing of the national programme, including public and private sources, is 1,6 trillion rubles. The biggest financing is planned for Information Infrastructure federal project — 768,5 billion rubles, and the smallest is for Regulation of Digital Environment, which is 1,7bn rubles,” Realnoe Vremya was said in the press service of the Ministry of State Management Digital Development, Information Technologies and Communications of Tatarstan.

The Ministry of Digitalisation of Tatarstan, in turn, created and agreed with colleagues from Moscow on five regional projects whose list isn’t very different from the federal one: Information Security, Information Infrastructure, Digital Technologies, Staff for Digital Economy, Digital State Management. It should be noted that according to the approved regional project passports through 2024, about 280 million rubles will be allocated from the regional budget.

Accessible Internet

According to the data given to our newspaper by the Ministry of Digitalisation of Tatarstan, within Information Infrastructure project, it is planned to provide 1,913 socially important facilities of the republic (schools, rural health posts, local self-governments, fire brigades, offices of Russian Guard, local polling stations) with broadband Internet access.

Digitalisation of citizens’ interaction with state authorities

In addition, within the project Digital State Management, it is considered to take a number of measures aimed at providing citizens and organisations with access to online priority state services. As the Ministry of Digitalisation of Tatarstan specifies, the rate of interaction of citizens and commercial organisations with authorities online will rise by 40% in 2024.

In a talk with Realnoe Vremya, Director of IT Park IT Technopark SAI Anton Grachyov explained that the Tatarstan Ministry of Digitalisation planned to digitalise communication among three parts of market members: citizens, the state and businesses. It is to become a multitargeted one-stop model of collection and exchange of information. The greatest effect will be achieved when there is one system aggregating different types of data and enabling communication of the chain.

The speaker stresses that today “there are all the tools to digitalise as many solutions as possible”.

Free digital skill training

Training of specialists is a serious challenge to the national project. To perform this task, residents of Tatarstan will be taught key digital economy skills free within Staff for Digital Economy regional project.

How it will look: our republic became one of the Russian regions to test a model of digital certificates given to workable citizens till the end of 2019, 1,000 Tatarstan residents will be trained. Educational institutions will be compensated for costs equal to 15,000 rubles per student. Four educational institutions of the republic have already got six grants totalling 46,56 million rubles: Innopolis University, KFU (in Yelabuga and the Lobachevsky Lyceum), Quantorium children’s technopark in Naberezhnye Chelny, Centre for Information Technologies in Education CJSC.

It should be reminded that workable Russians from 16 years to the pension age can improve the digital economy skills with the help of the programme: it is students, young specialists, self-employed people and the unemployed. The only requirement is to have a college or university degree (a citizen may be doing it now). To get the digital certificate, a person should submit an application in an educational institution that will provide free training.

Information security and lack of staff

There is a series of measures in Information Security project aimed to protect the person, society and state from internal and external information threats. For instance, a higher level of information security of republican facilities of critical information infrastructure and a rise in the number of specialists in information security.

According to Information Security Officer at BARS Group Ildar Garipov, the latter — staff training — is very topical now.

In our interlocutor’s opinion, closer communication of interested organisations with educational institutions from colleges and universities might become one of the solutions to this problem.

Subsidies to digitalise enterprises

As for the measures of Digital Technologies federal project, in this case, the Tatarstan Ministry of Digitalisation informs Tatarstan enterprises about measures of financing support for cross-cutting digital technologies.

“There are two programmes. One belongs to the Russian Ministry of Industry and Trade — 2 billion rubles only in 2019. The second programme is from the Russian Ministry of Digital Development, it is another 5 billion rubles. The conditions are: if you introduce platform-based technologies in your enterprise that allow getting a social and economic effect, reducing costs, the state is ready to subsidise 50% of the costs,” the minister of Digital Development of Public Administration, Information Technology and Communications of the Republic of Tatarstan explained the mechanism of support.

“We consider this measure unprecedented because earlier the state didn’t use to finance the implementation of solutions in enterprises, it helped to purchase some boxed solutions at best,” head of Kazan IT Park Anton Grachyov comments.

Our interlocutor thinks that the second advantage is that the subsidisation of enterprises to use Russian solutions itself means cross measures of support: “An enterprise gets a chance to buy a solution from a developer twice cheaper, while the developer can sell its solutions to a bigger number of potential clients, so developments and end consumers of these systems are supported”.