The Museum of Digital Society: A Living Archive of Digital Inclusion
DEF’s rural entrepreneurship-based smart village model Smartpur is growing with its extensive partnerships on ground across 100 locations in India. The project aims at bringing efficiency in daily lives under its six pillars—education, health, governance, finance, livelihood and edutainment. Under the health pillar, on April 3, a medical camp was held at Dharmarayudupeta, one of the Smartpur centres of Visakhapatnam, Andhra Pradesh. On April 14, another health camp was organised at Bidarka and Jhanjhar centres of Alwar, Rajasthan, that was attended by over a hundred people, including women and children, from nearby villages.
DEF rural entrepreneurship-based smart village model Smartpur is growing with its extensive partnerships on ground across 100 locations in India. The project aims at bringing efficiency in daily lives under its six pillars—education, health, governance, finance, livelihood and edutainment.
Under the health pillar on April 3, a medical camp was held at Dharmarayudupeta, one of the Smartpur centres of Visakhapatnam, Andhra Pradesh. On April 14, another one-day health camp was organised at Bidarka and Jhanjhar centres of Alwar, Rajasthan, that saw nearly a turnout of 120 and 110 people, respectively, including women and the children from nearby villages. These health check-ups are being provided free of cost to the beneficiaries. Health pillar along with livelihood are strengthening by the day in Rajasthan Meanwhile, a third health camp was organised in Tain village, Nuh district of Haryana, at the pilot site of Smartpur project on April 22.
At Ghansoli, the Hub centre in Alwar, Rajasthan, has been supported tremendously by AMEID (a local not-for-profit organisation) that has provided locally available infrastructure and manpower support. Children from nearby schools come to the resource centres from to feed their curiosity towards learning digital literacy tools. Helping them in this is START, a digital and media information literacy tool kit for first time technology learners that uses games and activity-based approach to teaching and learning.
Under the Education pillar, rural entrepreneurs, apart from regular tuitions and digital literacy classes, have been organising small awareness events across 10 Smartpur villages. This time in Nuh, one of the most backward districts located in Haryana’s Mewat region, saw various educational awareness drives and rallies that were led by primary school students and Smartpur entrepreneurs across villages.
Papipalem village of Chirala Mandal, Andhra Pradesh, had its Smartpur centre inauguration on April 3. On the same day, an education rally was carried out by centre’s entrepreneurs, who also concluded with a small career counseling camp which saw participation of several students from the village. A career counseling camp at Nunaparthy centre, Andra Pradesh, was held for the youth of the area on April 8. Ladamka village of Rajasthan also observed a one-day career counseling camp on April 12. This was conducted to include the students of class X and XII and undergraduates. The objective for the camp here was to disseminate information related to career options that are available to children there. A total 56 students attended the training camp.
Further, at 100 Smartpur centres in various villages, under the Entertainment pillar, on a weekly basis a movie screening takes place for the village community. The idea behind these screenings in not only to encourage social harmony but to create a social dialogue as well. On April 2 a motivational movie screening was held for the children of Ladamka village’s government schools, Bharatpur, Rajasthan. Towards the end of the screening, there was also a brief discussion with the school teacher held on digital education discussing the significance of it in today’s day and age.
The Livelihood pillar has started to take form in Smartpur. Week long training on mushroom cultivation was kept in the previous Rabi crop months for farmers of Alwar, Rajasthan. After a rich harvest of Oyster-mushroom, a bumper crop of paddy straw mushroom, for model farmer Sri Seva Singh, the training held to be fruitful. Mushroom farming has proved to be the most viable income generation activity in the region as per the participants. The training held before has yielded results today!
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