By emphasising on digital literacy, the Centre has finally set in motion more concrete steps to make its 'Skill India' and ‘Startup India' initiative meaningful.
Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said the Centre plans to launch a new scheme for rural India that intends to cover around 6 crore households in the next three years. Further, it has also earmarked provision of ₹1,700 crore for 1,500 multi-skill development centres that intends to create jobs. This move has received a thumbs up from companies and industry watchers.
According to MN Vidyashankar, President of India Electronics and Semiconductor Association (IESA), the digital literacy scheme is in line with the Prime Minister’s vision and looks to connect the dots - from making people digitally literate and also help them become entrepreneurs.
Others believe that the scheme at its basic level will help in improving the quality of education in rural areas.
Once the basic foundation of digital literacy is laid, it will create significant scope for some start-ups focussing on the education sector. “We can join hands with the government to make quality education accessible for all students in the farthest corners,” said Vamsi Krishna, CEO and Co-founder, Vedantu Innovations, a Bengaluru-based start-up.
The Centre has taken steps such as National Digital Literacy Mission and this aims to supplement those previous efforts, at a time when there are questions around the way this will unfold.
Ram Gollamudi, CEO and Founder of Edutor Technologies, said that if the funds can be deployed in a timely manner and efficiently utilised we will see significant positive cascading affect, which has a potential to reach a much larger body of students.
“Inefficient investments will not deliver the domino affect which is required for India massive education and skilling problem,” he added.