Kerala to become the first to achieve total digital literacy

New Delhi: The Kerala government informed us that the state has become the first to achieve total digital literacy, and it is waiting for the President's confirmation before making the official announcement.

Kerala’s Local Self Government minister MB Rajesh said, “We have achieved much beyond the guidelines stipulated by the National Digital Literacy Mission for digital literacy, which require training to be imparted only for those up to 60 years of age. This programme has included people of all ages,” The Hindu reported.

It was in 2022 that the Digi Kerala idea was initiated as a pilot programme of the Pullampara gram panchayat in Thiruvananthapuram to bring digital literacy to all residents there. The programme taught trainees, most of whom were using digital equipment for the first time, to make voice calls and video calls using smartphones, to use WhatsApp, to access government services, to carry out Internet banking and to use popular social media platforms.

Later, the programme was extended across the state for 21.88 lakh participants, who were identified as digitally illiterate through surveys conducted inwards. More than 2.57 lakh volunteers coordinated to organise classes for the participants.

An official who coordinated the programme said that after the training programme was completed, the trainees were evaluated to check how equipped they were. It was found that around 98% of the participants passed the evaluation after the third-party verification done by the Statistics department to ensure that the figures were accurate.

Retraining was conducted in wards where over 10% variation was seen, and offline training was provided in areas of low connectivity, the official said.