Google India has owned up a mission to create awareness for the appropriate use of internet technology to help people become responsible digital citizens.
At a time when internet abuse has become a real concern targeting vulnerable sections like children, youth, women and the elderly, awareness about safe use of internet and online services becomes critical, says Sunita Mohanty, Google India Director, Trust and Safety.
Explaining the objective behind embarking on this mission, Ms. Mohanty says Google, in a way, has become synonymous with internet as it organises information for the users. India has the second largest internet user base. The numbers crossed 400 million in 2017 and is expected to touch 650 million in two years.
“If we don’t do this now, we will fall behind in building a generation of responsible internet users; the first-time unsuspecting internet users coming from villages, tier three cities and old people who probably lack the technical literacy,” Ms. Mohanty elaborates, while speaking to The Hindu .
“We have been running programmes to educate different sections of people including school students and teachers at our Hyderabad office under the Web Rangers programme. But after three years, we realised the importance of scaling it up across the country. That’s how Google India collaborated with the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) to integrate a course on ‘Digital Citizenship and Safety’ in its Information and Communication Technology curriculum,” she said.
The curriculum developed by NCERT in collaboration with Google will be used to train students from class I to 12 across 1.4 million schools covering 80 million students in partnership with CBSE Boards.
Google India aims to reach out to 100 million users by 2020. Digital education course for teachers is available on CBSE website and efforts are on to include it in B.Ed curriculum. Next on the agenda are master training workshops for teachers across India, hands-on online training for CBSE staff in 12 regional hubs, and then providing the content for parents. It is also working with the Goa, Telangana and Kerala governments to include digital safety content in their curricula and is partnering with Unicef’s Hackathon.
