Digital Didi Changing Mindsets, Practices and Narratives
Palanivel is a 15-year-old Tamil-speaking boy who is studying in Class XI at a government school in Musiri village of Tamil Nadu. He comes from a weaver household, and is a young weaver himself who regularly visits the Musiri digital resource centre for digital training. A few months ago, Digital Empowerment Foundation in partnership with Mphasis, established a digital resource centre under project ‘Musiri’ of its Digital Cluster Development Programme. Palanivel learnt about the centre when the local centre staff was energetically mobilising the community members to enroll for digital literacy classes.
Every day, Palanivel is accompanied to the centre with his mother, Manjushree, who patiently sits through the entire session and keenly watches her son’s every activities ranging from how he uses the mouse to understanding what is reflected on the monitor. Manjushree says she’s slowly acclimatising herself to the digital world this way. In the last few weeks that she has been learning by watching, Manjushree has been immensely inspired. She says she’ll watch and learn for another two weeks and then feel comfortable enough to enroll herself for digital literacy classes.
Manjushree and her son believe that digital technology will help them have a direct access to their customers unlike the present time when they weave cotton sarees everyday but don’t know who they are going to.
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