DIGITAL LITERACY AND WAYS TO IMPROVE IT – INDIA

“Digital Literacy, the ability to use technology to navigate, evaluate, and create information.”

Digital Literacy refers to the qualities one needs to live, learn, and work in a society where communication and access to information is growing each day through digital technologies like internet platforms, social media, and mobile devices.

In the developing digital world, most of the career choices require digital communication at some point. The current COVID-19 pandemic also augmented the demand for digital literacy and digital connections. Millions of people are working from home due to the uncertainties. Hence, there’s an increasing spotlight and pressure on technology.

In times of difficulty, several educational institutions proved to efficiently utilize their time by holding online classes on various meeting apps (Zoom, Microsoft teams, Cisco WebEx). This was achieved by the digital literacy of teachers and students alike.

Digital literacy is growing to become an essential job skill at all levels of an organization. Developing digital literacy and a chosen discipline can help employees and job candidates develop the hard and soft skills for which employers are looking. Digital literacy is a straight pathway to be a competitive candidate in today’s workforce.

The digital world’s knowledge and the technology involved have to be pivotal for the future to be digitalised. Our country has took steps in climbing up the ladder of development, struggling to take a step forward, yet digital literacy is a distant dream.

Almost 40% of the population of the country are below the poverty line. The general illiteracy rate is between 25 to 30%, and digital illiteracy is more than 90%. The digital divide in India causes road-block on the path of digital literacy.

In India, only 20.1% of people can use internet facilities. The presence of high-speed internet is confined to towns and cities, while many villages don’t get a stable signal on their mobile phones. The availability of broadband in some rural areas is almost negligible. In case of online education, not only many of the teachers are digitally incompetent, but a large number of them also have never used an online environment to teach before.

One of the key Digital India schemes is the ‘Pradhan Mantri Gramin Digital Saksharta Abhiyan’ scheme. It was approved in February 2017, to make one person each in six crores rural households’ digital literate by March 2019. However, as on 31 December 2019, only 3.19 crore people have enrolled and out of which training has been imparted to only 2.56 crore. Only 1.88 crores have been certified under the scheme.

Even though TATA, JIO, and FACEBOOK offered many initiatives and projects for women and for low to bridge the gender and digital divide, it’s still a long way to go. Only sheer will and focused minds can overcome all the odds.

If we all unite in the dream of “DIGITAL INDIA,” we can indeed achieve elevated Digital literacy standards. Creating awareness in people about the broad spectrum of functionality that they can have with digital power in hand, will surely make them crave to get it.

Our government has to bring spotlight on proper implementation and regulate deadlines of current existing policies and upcoming new policies in our favor. A few of them are

1) Emergence to increase the coverage of target from every day 6 crore citizens, along with incentivizing to digital literacy training;

2) Subsidizing telecom operators to provide internet services to segments of the population below the poverty line as well as for people living in remote areas;

3) Better investments in infrastructure and broadband connectivity at the level of villages;

4) Strengthening data access, sharing, protection, privacy laws (digital security is a primary concern of most people);

5) Establish an internationally recognized digital skill standard-setting body to balance and supply digital skills.

6) Conduction of free webinars at district levels for people related to different sections, for example – business people employing around 20 or more employee, firm managers, leaders of various small non-government people organizations running in a rural household, to seed the very idea of importance to elevate digital literacy and how it can help their sectors;

7) Another webinar for school teachers focusing first to make them digitally competent and then help develop alternative programs such as MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) eventually;

8) To develop some schemes, incentives to be awarded to those people who follow the above guidelines.

9) To set up a regulatory body among the above people to re-evaluate progress being achieved at every step.

We should never lose hope and also should help our fellow beings as we all are part of this great nation. Combination of online and offline teaching in an innovative way can help in bridging the digital divide. The growing use of smartphones by all categories of people can also help serve as a tool to provide digital literacy. Youth these days are aware that digital literacy gets them to a better position and earn a job.

Last but not the least, try to analyze people in your immediate surroundings and teach them. Hope the article makes an efficient impact on digital literacy in the country. Also women and our senior citizens, don’t limit yourselves and consider you to be old enough not to start something fresh.

“YOU ARE NEVER TOO OLD TO SET ANOTHER GOAL OR TO DREAM A NEW DREAM”