Kapil Sibal, union minister for communications and IT today launched a comprehensive programme in Delhi to make one person e-literate in every household. The programme has been aptly named ‘e-inclusion’ project, as digital knowledge today is helpful in bringing marginalised people into the mainstream.

Sibal called digital literacy a form of liberation for people from being at the margins of society. “In India we have only 32,000 bank branches for six lakh villages. 70 crore people, that is the population of US and Europe combined, do not have access to basic banking in India,” he said.

The minister said that the new policy of e-inclusion would make 25 crore people in India digitally literate so that they would be able to access all kinds of e-services for themselves in sectors of health, education and banking. “Of course this cannot be done by the government alone but would be undertaken in a public-private partnership (PPP) mode,” he said.

Sibal informed that the training would be undertaken in three phases. In the first phase, 45,000 children would be identified and provided training. The number would then go up to 10 lakh and then to a crore. J Satyanarayana, secretary, department of electronics and IT (DeitY) said that the scheme to train 10 lakh students is on the verge of approval and will be operational soon. “This scheme would be implemented under the PPP mode with NIELIT and Nasscom and other private companies,” he said.

For the first leg, 300 students have already been identified and provided training under the basic computer course (BCC) of National Institute for Electronics and IT (NIELIT). 10 of the top scorers were felicitated in the function by Sibal.

Satyanarayana informed that the common services centre (CSC) network would be used to provide digital literacy to the people.

For this purpose, he said, one lakh village level entrepreneurs (VLEs) who run the CSCs would be trained to provide digital literacy to people. “e-inclusion is not just e-literacy but also financial inclusion, e-governance, e-livelihoods and inclusion of physically disabled people,” he said.