Now villagers can avail health, educational and benefits of other government initiatives by just clicking on their computers or mobile as the government decked up to launch its new programme, ‘Digital Village’.
Under the programme, the government will offer services including e-medicine, e-education, Internet connectivity services and light-emitting diode lights to those selected villages. Common Service Centres (CSCs), also known as Digital Seva Kendras, will also be included in the programme for offering last-mile connectivity through Wi-Fi services in these villages.
The government has trained its focus to digitally connect rural areas of the country and spend around Rs 10,000 crore from the Universal Service Obligation Fund (USOF) in the current financial year in building rural digital infrastructure.
The programme would be rolled out in 100 villages initially and will be expanded later, Law and IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said on Monday.
“We are going to unleash another important initiative — Digital Village. As per my understanding, it will be a collector-driven initiative. We propose to begin with 100 villages and expand it later,” Prasad said at the Digital India Awards event here.
He said a collector with the help of concerned local bodies may select a village to provide health, education and other virtual world service through Wi-Fi connectivity.
The minister appealed to officers at the event to pro-actively join in the government’s digital initiative aimed at transforming the country. “We have trained 18 lakh people over a span of four days. We may scale it (digital payments training) up in January,” he said. Government has set a target of training 1.25 crore people on digital payments by March 31, 2017. Minister of State for Law and IT P P Chaudhary appreciated National Informatics Centre and said that there are about 8,000 websites carrying information about government work and facilitating transactions.
