Digital literacy training to reach 52.5 lac - Fusion - WeRIndia

The government has advanced the deadline of making 52.5 lakh people digitally literate to 2016 from the end of 2017. This move has given a great boost to the Digital India initiative. Ajay Kumar, Additional Secretary, Department of Electronics and IT stated that the aim of government originally was to make 52.5 lac people digitally literate by 2017 under National Digital Literacy Mission.

He said that now the government is planning to change that target to 2016. They want to achieve digital literacy one year ahead of the planned time.

He said that 10 lac people have already been certified and that 8 lac more are already in the process of get their certificates. DISHA (Digital Saksharta Abhiyan ) or National Digital Literacy Mission (NDLM) Scheme has been formulated to impart IT training to 52.5 lakh persons. These persons include ASHA workers and authorized ration dealers in all states/UTs across the country.

The aim is to make non-IT literate citizens to become IT literate.

He added that there are more than one lac common service centers which are not teaching digital training under the government mission. Nasscom Foundation and business software firm SAP announced partnership for opening 25 NDLM centres. Nasscom Foundation Chairman Ganesh Natarajan said that each of these centers will train 1,000 people every year. At present, Nasscom Foundation has 75 centers.

The level 1 course is taught to people free of cost said Shrikant Sinha, the CEO of Nasscom Foundation.

He added that the foundation is set to launch a nation-wide digital literacy volunteering campaign.

In this, each volunteer will train at least two people about digital literacy skills with the help of the newly created NDLM-MyKartavya mobile app. All these new developments are definitely pushing the Digital India initiative fast.

Image by Peggy und Marco Lachmann-Anke from Pixabay (Free for commercial use)

Image Reference: https://pixabay.com/illustrations/laptop-learn-school-computer-1019763/