Kerala CM Pinarayi Vijayan to declare Pullampara as digitally literate panchayat

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: With the objective of making citizens digitally literate, Pullampara panchayat’s ‘DigiPullampara’ project has successfully accomplished its well-charted goal.
The panchayat is all set for the official declaration which will be done by chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan on September 21. The success of the project owes to its detailed planning under the leadership of a core team comprising five members.
“We started off the plan in August 2021 with the help of a startup called Pan Environ. They created an app for us to assess the number of digitally illiterate people from the age of 14 to 65 in our panchayat. Of the total, we decided to exclude those who are severely unwell, bedridden or completely uninterested,” says Pullampara panchayat president Rajesh PV, one of the core team members. The project is set to cover 3,480 citizens in the panchayat. It had its modules curated by the NSS unit under APJ Abdul Kalam Technological University. The project, which started off in two wards, was later expanded to more wards in four phases.
The trainers who taught different modules were students from five different engineering colleges in the city. Additionally, Kudumbashree groups also took part in the teaching process. The modules included understanding the basic apps and functions which are used in daily life like how to call and end the call, how to use WhatsApp, the ways to download pictures, videos and voice clips on the app, how to voice call or video call as well as introducing the features of Facebook and YouTube. Those who had bank accounts were also shown how to check their account balance using internet banking.
The highlight of the project is that officials did not stop with the teaching phase. Each participant had to then go through an evaluation process led by the students of Balaramapuram Trinity College. As many as 96.4% of the participants passed the evaluation. A major setback was the lack of network coverage in most areas. “It was finally MP John Brittas who helped us. Within two weeks of writing to him, a mobile tower was sanctioned. Now, our panchayat has full coverage,” said Rajesh.