Digital India

In a major push to conserve and promote the handicraft skills in India, Shri Ravi Shankar Prasad, Hon’ble Minister of Electronics & Information Technology, Law & Justice, has launched an e-Commerce portal named ‘VLE Bazaar’ (https://vlebazaar.csc.gov.in) at the Bihar VLE Conference held in Patna on June 23, 2016. The portal directly connects rural artisans to the intended audience thereby enhancing their earning capabilities and ensuring authenticity of the art for the buyer. The initiative envisages connecting class II and classing III cities, raising employment and entrepreneurship opportunities. The portal showcases items across myriad categories such as art work like Bihar’s famous Madhubani paintings, handicrafts, accessories, clothing, paintings, food items, home decor and more. This is a first of its kind e-Commerce website with authentic rural products sourced directly from rural India. In partnership with other e-Commerce players, CSC SPV has been instrumental in the development of the portal with the aim to promote rural market products. This will enable VLEs to sell handmade or local products and also create an opportunity to build their own brand.

With the changing landscape in governance, internal stakeholders and e-Governance practitioners need to be continuously equipped with new skills and knowledge to effectively contribute to a digitally empowered India. To foster continuous learning it is imperative to use technology in such a way that learning and knowledge exchange becomes a normal engagement without external interventions.The Learning Management System (LMS) is an application for administration, documentation, tracking and reporting of training programs, classroom and online events, e-learning programs, and training content.

It is an infrastructure that delivers and manages instructional content, identifies and assesses individual and organizational learning or training goals, tracks the progress towards meeting those goals, and collects and presents data for supervising the learning process of the organization as a whole. It delivers content but also handles course registration, course administration, skill gap analysis, tracking, and reporting.

The campaign was flagged off by Shri Ravi Shankar Prasad, Hon’ble Minister of Electronics & Information
Technology, Law & Justice at New Media Centre, PIB, New Delhi. He purported that such campaigns are important to penetrate Digital India services in rural & semi urban areas and are an important tool for bridging the digital divide. The campaign was also flagged-off by Hon’ble Chief Ministers of Chhattisgarh, Haryana & Jharkhand in their respective states.

It began on 30th May, 2016 and will run till 31st March, 2017 covering 657 districts of the country. Vans equipped with audio visual facilities, Internet connectivity and other IEC materials are already informing and educating citizens in rural areas, especially the youth, about various initiatives of Digital India in an interactive manner. On-site engagement with rural citizens is being done through quizzes, contests and augmented reality games. These vans will cover more than 13 lakh kilometres in the country over 13,200 man days to reach out to more than 10 lakh citizens. District level committees, headed by the District Collector will foresee the ground level execution of this campaign, so as to ensure that maximum benefit is generated out of this campaign.
Youth in these areas is also being encouraged to register themselves for innovative services of Digital India like
MyGov, Digital Locker and Aadhaar. The aim is to successfully register at least 1.5 lakh rural citizens for
MyGov, Digital Locker, Aadhaar and other Digital Services.