Making Digital India a reality soon

Khammam: The Union government has recently declared Mallelamadugu village in the district as ‘100 per cent digital literacy village’. It is a remote village in Aswapuram mandal where we cannot even dream of having cell phone signals. As many of the villagers are not educated, the prime source of their income is just hard work. To everybody’s astonishment, the people of the same village now are able to work on computers and internet-related activities. The credit for this turn-around goes to Konda Srinivas and his 12-year-long commitment.

Srinivas is 30-year-old MBA graduate. While studying Class X itself, he learnt using computer. During the days of his Intermediate studies, he used to conduct computer-orientation programmes for the youth. His inclination towards making his village a computer-literate is obvious with that gesture. After finishing higher education in Hyderabad, he returned to the village and applied for opening up an e-Seva centre in the village, where not even kirana shops were seen. As the government conceded to his request, he opened the same at his home.

This paved way for the villagers who started enjoying the internet-related services. Then, he wanted to make his village a model and wanted to extend it to the surrounding villages. To make this possible, along with 10 like-minded youth, Srinivas started a social service organisation called Srinivas Colour Sky Academy. He started conducting the computer training programmes all over the mandal in 2010.

At this juncture, the Union Government’s ambitious National e-Governance Plan (NeGP) opened gates for Srinivas, a scheme to launch Common Services Center (CSC). Raj Kishore, coordinator of CSC for Telangana State, helped him start e-Saaksharatha programme under the Union government’s Digital Literacy Mission.

How does the scheme work?
In each village, a person having some interest towards computer and internet from each household is selected in the age group of 14-60 years. This is a completely free programme which requires the trainee to be a bit literate who studied up to Class V. During the preliminary stage, training will be conducted for 10 to 20 days which will be followed by an online test. The online test is conducted very strictly with the use of web cameras and bio-metric system.

In his maiden attempt, Srinivas arranged a training centre at Aswapuram and trained 80 people of which the majority was housewives in the age group of 20-50 years. All of them passed online test and got certificates. Now they are able to operate computers while using internet and acquired the knowledge sufficient for sending e-mails and using Youtube on their smart phones.

Inspired with that success, Srinivas wanted every family of Mallelamadugu, which has 508 families, to become computer literate. With the coordination of Upa Sarpanch Kamatam Venkanna, he conducted an awareness meeting with villagers focusing the benefits of computer literacy. But, many villagers were reluctant to join as they are mere daily labourers. Only 20 persons evinced interest. Encouraged by this, Srinivas started training them in the government high school with the help of the headmaster.

But, Srinivas did not leave the other villagers. He used to go to their houses to impress upon them. The housewives were convinced to undergo training but refused to go to the government high school. Then, he formed groups of 20 women each and trained them at a common place convenient for them. In order to make them use the mouse, he took up MS Paint, followed by typing on notepad. As a result, all the 170 women in the village became e-literates and all others attended the training at the school.

After the training, the villagers started browsing through the internet in Telugu through which they were comfortable watching videos related to agriculture and sending and receiving e-mails. Once the online test was conducted for them, it was proved that a person from each household got the computer knowledge and that paved way for declaring Mallelamadugu as the third digital village in Telangana by the CSC.

In another village…

Srinivas repeated same in Gopalapuram also which led to the village being declared as the fourth digital village in the State. IT Minister KT Rama Rao handed over commendation letter to Srinivas as he became the first person to groom two digital villages with 95 per cent of women becoming computer literates.

A housewife Kola Geetha who learnt computer knowledge from Srinivas got an opportunity to run a computer centre at the mandal headquarters. Even other housewives like Jhansi, Chaitanya and Prasanna were appointed as computer operators in the local schools and super markets. “With the same zeal and enthusiasm, I would like to put forward all the required efforts to make all the villages in the mandal, IT-enabled,” says Srinivas.