With the announcement of the first fully digitally literate state, one of DEF's researchers has been travelling and talking to a few officials regarding their earlier work in building up to the announcement. This week's TypeRight is one part of those conversations.
Last week, the Chief Minister of Kerala announced that Kerala is "the first fully digitally literate State in India, marking the completion of the first phase of the ‘Digi Kerala’ digital literacy programme, a grass-roots level intervention across all local self-government bodies with an aim to bridge the digital divide."
This is in a series of pushes by several successive governments to achieve higher social development indices. In 1991, the national literacy mission declared the state to have achieved total literacy. While there has since been fluctuations with respect to the continued literacy missions, the state also achieved universal primary education coverage a decade ago.
IT@School was created in 2001 to make sure that school kids could get IT education as IT became more popular across the country. In the middle of the 2000s, the government turned down Microsoft's offer to work on the project and instead focused on using FOSS. According to the project, Kerala would be the first state in India where everyone could read and write on a computer by 2005. It was started by President Kalam in 2002. The project changed its mind about FOSS after going through three different governments in Trivandrum over the course of five to six years.
As part of its many projects, KITE runs an educational channel called KITE VICTERS (Versatile ICT Enabled Resource for Students). This channel provides engaging virtual classrooms where students and teachers can talk directly with subject experts and educationists. Along with YouTube, they now have two feeds that are on all the time. This got them through the pandemic and lockdowns.
During the pandemic in 2020, KITE started a program called "Satyameva Jayate." This program taught over 20 lakh students from class 5 to class 10 how to use digital media properly, with the help of nearly 6,000 trainers. The goal was to give students the basic skills they needed to spot fake news and stop it from spreading. Starting in June 2021, the second part of the program went live. This time, KITE trained kids from class 8 to 12 one-on-one. The third step started in August 2022 with what KITE calls a "special training module." Each student got training that lasted more than two and a half hours and was broken up into four parts. They talked about how to use the Internet in everyday life, social media and its users, what's right and wrong on social media, and how to stop fake news from spreading.
The Thaliparamba Assembly constituency in Kerala initiated a public digital literacy initiative named e-dam (Educational and Digital Awareness Mission) to promote comprehensive digital literacy among all individuals. The Kerala Public Education Department, the Kerala State Literacy Mission Authority, KITE - Kerala, and the Educational Committee of the Thaliparamba Assembly Constituency collaborated on the project.
The project commenced on April 1, 2023, after a training module was compiled. This followed the setting up of organizing committees at both the assembly constituency and local administration levels to ensure the training proceeded effectively. On April 27, 2023, 364 individuals acquired the skills to conduct surveys - and they went on to find out how many people required the training.
The program commenced on May 2, 2023. From May 3 to May 6, 1,033 volunteers received training to become e-dam trainers. Subsequently, training sessions were conducted in various public venues, including residences, rural reading rooms, and clubs. Each center accommodated between 5 and 25 trainees. Review meetings in each Panchayat and Municipality monitored the progress.
Later that year, the Thaliparamba Assembly constituency was the inaugural Legislative Assembly constituency to be proclaimed entirely digitally literate. In the event where this was proclaimed, women who learned using their smartphones for the first time had taken photos with the MLA, and this photo was a unique and curious moment.
(More reports on this will be covered in future chapters)
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