About the Scheme PMGDISHA
- Pradhan Mantri Gramin Digital Saksharata Abhiyan (PMGDISHA) is an integral component of Digital India Initiative and is expected to be one of the largest digital literacy programmes in the world.
- PMGDISHA scheme was initiated in February, 2017.
- The implementation of the Scheme would be carried out under the overall supervision of Ministry of Electronics and IT in active collaboration with States/UTs through their designated State Implementing Agencies, District e-Governance Society (DeGS), etc.
- The scheme will be implemented through Training Centre – One in Every Panchayat (2.5 Lakh Training Centre).
- Corporate through CSR and NGOs having facilities for conduct of training also participates in Digital Literacy program.
The Main Objective of the PMGDISHA are;
a) to provide basic digital literacy training to citizens across rural India, targeting at least one person from every household.
b) to make 6 crore citizens digitally literate in rural India by March, 2019.
c) to provide equal opportunity to rural citizens enabling them to actively participate in nation building and access livelihood through Digital Technology, Devices and Services.
More Details about the PMGDISHA
- Under the scheme, 25 lakh candidates will be trained in the Financial Year 2016-17; 275 lakh in the Financial Year 2017-18; and 300 lakh in the Financial Year 2018-19.
- To ensure equitable geographical reach, each of the 250,000 Gram Panchayats would be expected to register an average of 200-300 candidates.
- The course content would also have emphasis on Digital Wallets, Mobile Banking, Unified Payments Interface (UPI), Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) and Aadhaar Enabled Payment System (AEPS), etc.
- Citizens would be skilled in operating digital devices like computers, tablets, smart phones and use Internet in daily life for enhancing their skills and knowledge, access Government to Citizens services, healthcare and financial services as well.
- The scheme also focuses on enabling digital financial transactions among the citizens. By seeding Aadhaar number to bank account of the beneficiary and enabling him to access various online Government services like booking of railway tickets, passport application, etc would enable the citizen to leverage technology and participate actively in governance.
Background of PMGDISHA:
- As per the 71st NSSO Survey on Education 2014, only 6% of rural households have a computer.
- This highlights that more than 15 crore rural households (@ 94% of 16.85 crore households) do not have computers and a significant number of these households are likely to be digitally illiterate.
- Therefore, PMGDISHA has been envisaged to address such problems of digital illiteracy.
- The PMGDISHA would cover 6 crore households in rural areas to make them digitally literate.
- This would empower the citizens by providing them access to information, knowledge and skills for operating computers / digital access devices.
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