Overview Of Digital India Policy To Increase Digital Literacy
Lack of awareness of digital financial literacy, especially among the rural population is a major challenge in the country, more so in light of the Government’s recent demonetization and plans to make India a cashless economy. Although digital literacy frameworks are being developed throughout the world, variations based on a variety of contextual factors can be observed. Efforts in USA, for example, tend to focus on individual empowerment and educational policy while South Africa’s National e-Skills Plan of Action Emphasizes job skills and entrepreneurships as a path to development. The European framework also highlights the need to tailor programs to local, regional or national circumstances.
Economic And cultural diversity and various national contextual factors may provide a challenge to develop a uniform European framework, and national policies may play a critical role in applying or adapting the framework. Digital India has the goal to ensure transparency and avoid corruption in services reaching the beneficiary, along with providing good governance and ensuring inclusion with an effective service delivery system. The Indian Government, under the Pradhan Mantri Gramin Digital Saksharta Abhiyan scheme, aims to make 60 million citizens digitally literate in rural India. The program also envisages equal opportunity to all rural citizens, enabling them in livelihood and services through digital technology. It partners with training organizations (NGOs) and encourages small rural entrepreneurship through the Central Service Centers to provide digital services to villages.
The proposed IDLF - Inclusive Digital Learning Framework, promotes safe use of digital technologies to access information, communication, e-Governance services, job skills, learning, and financial services such as online banking and e-health services. However, without awareness about benefits, services and rights, many low-literate populations are unwilling to invest the time and take advantage of the services provided by the government and NGOs. Hence to increase motivation and participation, awareness is included in each component of IDLF, the e-Governance Literacy component, for example, informs and offers easy access to relevant online Government services. In addition to its tailored focus on low-literate learners, the framework also considers those with learning difficulties and disabilities. Each component must incorporate accessibility features in the design so as to support those with reading disabilities. India’s IDLF framework must work with multiple languages and cultural contexts. The IDLF framework must cater to neo-literate and low-literate populations and focus on creating awareness about education, health, income generation, specific governance services meant for inclusion, along with access and digital skills.
An inclusive framework must have goals of individual empowerment and education policy, but implement them in the context of low access, low literacy, low infrastructure and low awareness. The vulnerable communities must be made aware of the exploitation they are subjected to due to a lack of awareness on their part. The increasing number of landless tribals in Kerala is a result of exploitation by outsiders as the innocent tribal communities are largely dependent on non-tribals for their credit requirements. A study on the ST cooperatives, started to help the backward communities, and the financial status of the members reveal that more than 80 percent of the members find it difficult to meet their expenditure because of low level of income and hence, borrowing is very common. More than 75 percent of the borrowers cannot repay their loans and are being exploited in various forms. In these IDFLs, social issues such as alcoholism and domestic violence, measures related to women empowerment should also be addressed, most of which are related in some way to literacy.
A well-defined Digital literacy education model. Our overall objectives are to empower rural people, particularly youth, through computer education, to create awareness about IT, social services and health education, and most importantly to improve the quality of life, build resilience and offer accessibility to various plans and projects for their benefit. The Education Model should be designed using the IDLF, encompassing Information, Health, Education and Financial Literacies. While it may not be possible to deliver computers to every marginalized community, smartphones are ubiquitous now and can be leveraged for their empowerment. m-Learning With the proliferation of low cost manufacturers and the government’s Make In India scheme, there has been an increase in the reach of low-cost smartphones, along with e-Governance Services in regional languages. The tablets themselves initially attracted students to the program. Factors for tablets gaining acceptance for learning are portability and an interactive interface, with the touch-screen being convenient and easy to learn to navigate.
Mobile Android tablets were used to teach skills such as using a word processor and creating spreadsheets. In Kerala, Game-oriented apps and eBooks on low cost android tablets in Malayalam language were developed and adapted for effective learning. Tablet-based education can foster literacy and education, link rural students with faculty at universities, train teachers remotely, offer online science virtual labs to students who do not have access to traditional labs, assist in learning disabilities and remotely monitor classrooms. It can also provide the awareness needed to tackle various social and Towards IDLF for digital India health issues. More advanced techniques such as personalization, using character recognition and speech recognition for language learning provide detailed, individualized feedback to the learner while customizing presentation to suit the learner. Collectively, NGOs can rope in technology giants like Google and other smartphone manufacturers to build devices and apps that are conducive to rural digital literacy an inclusiveness. It's preferable to have low-cost devices and training modules that are adaptable to low-resource environments with intermittent electricity. Multilingual adaptability of training materials included a vernacular app and videos for basic computer literacy, financial literacy, health literacy, accessing e-Governance services and other basic schemes.
The educational content in these studies was customized to the needs of tribal youth and adults, taking into consideration the language as well as lack of consistent connectivity and low processing power. The integrated program (Figure 2) is designed to teach novices to operate computers and use the internet by integrating content relevant to individual learners, such as accessing e-Governance applications, making digital payments, engaging in online banking, setting up and accessing e-mail, performing basic word processing and gaining access to educational resources, health services and government schemes. It also provided access to digital libraries, games and apps for e-learning. In short we could go about increasing the digital financial literacy through the following measures:
- By hosting awareness sessions focused in their community and Panchayat.
- By informing rural citizens about government policies and about digital financial options available to them
- By enabling citizens to access and use electronic payment system (EPS) such as IMPS, UPI, Bank PoS machines etc. .
- By sensitizing and enabling merchants at Panchayat level to use Electronic Payment System.
- Creating awareness in rural India through workshops and awareness drives.
There should be units of people belonging to NGOs mobilized to bring awareness programs to these communities. Each unit would reach out to at least 10 local merchants, shopkeepers, artisans per Panchayat to facilitate them in getting PoS machines or digital payment mechanisms.
