(The country may boast of several villages going digital under the Central governments National Digital Literacy Mission, but the case of Akoli village in Jainad mandal of Adilabad district, Telangana is quite unique. It has become the first village in the country to go 100 per cent digitally literate under the Common Service Centre of India (CSCI) programme thanks to the single-handed and untiring effort of a 32-year-old graduate, Nivalkar Gajanan, hailing from nearby Gimma village.
Akoli has also been recently declared the third 100 per cent digitally literate village in Telangana after Basar, also in Adilabad, and Narsingpally in Nizamabad district, both under the State government's Digital Village programme. The remote sleepy village located on the banks of Penganga river on the district's border with Maharashtra now has at least one person in each of its 167 households who is well versed with basic knowledge in computers and can pay electricity bills and access other such services, though a CSC is yet to be opened.
Himself a computer literate, Gajanan is a village level entrepreneur (VLE) who runs a CSC on the NH-44 in the same mandal and was inspired to do something worthwhile when the NDLM was launched in 2015 with a view to making at least one person in every household digitally literate.
His drive had him organising computer training sessions and spending almost the entire earning, at Rs. 500 per trainee, on the training programme itself.
"We had at least one person who had studied up to 7th class in every household which made our task quite easy. In about 25 days of intensive training, we could teach each of them the basic computer knowledge," Gajanan recalled of his experience of January this year.
"I can access all services offered in a CSC," asserted Naitham Ganitha, a Gond Adivasi girl trained by Gajanan.
She has been selected to operate the CSC whenever it starts functioning in the village.
Village sarpanch Kunchetti Keshav, who was actively involved in facilitating the training, is also looking forward to getting the facility started as the computers needed for the CSC and for a training lab have arrived. "This will be a boon to our village," the sarpanch observed as he went over the difficulty involved in remitting bills manually.
In a matter of a few weeks, the names of Mandagada, Korta, Sirsanna and Rampur will also be added to the list as Gajanan's training programme is under way in these villages too.
