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On August 21, Kerala will be declared cent percent digitally literate. This means, according to the government, that nearly everyone aged 14 and above now knows the basic functioning of a smartphone—make calls, download apps, text and email, and use social media.
Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan will make the announcement at an event hosted by the Local Self Government Department, which took up the ‘Digi Keralam’ project in 2023.
In the last two years, more than 2.5 lakh volunteers, including students and Kudumbashree workers, conducted a survey of 1.5 crore people to check the digital literacy of those aged between 14 and 65. But as it went on, the upper age limit disappeared and the elderly, aged even above 100 years, joined the training. The volunteers found 21.8 lakh people to be digitally illiterate and trained them to use a smartphone. A test was conducted to evaluate the progress and 98.8% of the participants passed it.
“The results were better than what we expected. The project was conducted around the same time that we rolled out the KSMART initiative, to bring all the local self government services online. It made sense that users become digitally literate so they could access the online services,” says Minister of Local Self Government, MB Rajesh.
The inspiring story of Pullampara
The project was inspired by the success of the Pullampara panchayat in Thiruvananthapuram in making the residents of all ages digitally literate. Sixty-nine-year-old Sarassu, falling under the extreme poverty line and belonging to a Scheduled Castes community, became the poster child of the campaign, with her videos of folk songs and her uninhibited smile spreading on Whatsapp groups.
Stepping outside her humble apartment on top of a hill in Pullampara, Sarassu says with a shy smile that she cannot sing as she was unwell, and pulls out her phone to show her gallery of photos and the Youtube videos she likes to watch. “I like to see new places on Google, watch Youtube videos, and take photos of my near and dear ones. We are close, my daughter, daughter-in-law, and I, all of us are widows,” she says, looking away.
Pullampara panchayat vice president SR Aswathy says that Sarassu has been one of the most enthusiastic and quickest learners. Like many others in the locality, Sarassu too was trained at her job site where she goes to work under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) scheme.
“She created her own Youtube channel and began posting videos there,” says Sajina Sathar, assistant director at LSGD, who was instrumental in launching the campaign at Pullampara.
Sajina had just moved to Pullampara around the time the world went into lockdown after the COVID-19 outbreak in 2020. Communication became difficult for those without smartphones. But what really touched her was watching long lines of daily wage labourers outside the only bank in the panchayat, waiting for hours, only to check their balance. “They’d take a rickshaw for Rs 300 and wait in the bank all day just to know what their balance is,” Sajina says.
What began as a vague idea, to help the villagers, soon became a concrete plan when more like-minded people heard her out. Sajina and two other employees of the LSGD – Sanoop and Dinesh – made a basic plan to train the villagers on how to use a smartphone. They approached the Kerala APJ Abdul Kalam Technological University (KTU) to check and finalise their modules. A startup designed a portal to run spreadsheets for evaluation.
“Nationally, we have a digital literacy mission, but that focussed on basic computer knowledge – using a mouse and keyboard and so on. Only one person in a family needs to be trained for the whole family to be considered as digitally literate, and the mission is also limited to the age group of 14 to 60. When we began the campaign for Pullampara, we decided that every person in every family between the ages of 14 and 65 should be trained. But then we did not stop there, we ended up training even 90 and 100-year-olds,” Sajina says.
The panchayat president Rajesh PV was totally welcoming of the project, and encouraged them to increase the age limit. “The first challenge was getting the villagers interested in the project. Many older people would ask why they’d need it at their age. Then we would tell them that they could videocall their children living far away, speak to their grandchildren, that they could learn new farming techniques or watch serials they missed on Youtube. The second challenge was the lack of network coverage,” says Shamnad, who was the coordinator of the Pullampara project.
The lack of network coverage was a serious hurdle, with many villagers protesting against the project at a time they could not even make a call from the house. Multiple meetings with service providers had not yielded any result at first. “Finally, Member of Parliament John Brittas came to the rescue. He took the matter up and Jio installed a tower within a month. The network extended even to a neighbouring panchayat,” Sajina says.
Once they got the villagers interested in the project, the next step was gathering volunteers and training them. School and college students from the neighbourhood, mostly from the National Service Scheme (NSS), and Kudumbashree workers were trained by a master trainer.
“We were initially worried how the villagers would respond, but the panchayat president was very confident and gave us all the encouragement. There was some reluctance at first but soon they all embraced the idea and many began to buy smartphones from their savings or pension,” says Kudumbashree CDS chairperson Preetha.
Training was conducted at the MNREGA job sites or else at the homes of the elderly. “The third method was to teach the children of the house and have them train the older members in the family,” Sajina adds.
Three modules of five activities each were designed by the core team. A volunteer would take four to five days to do the teaching. Once the training was complete, a different volunteer would test the participants and those who complete six or more of the 15 activities would be considered ‘passed’.
The three modules are basic operations of a phone, use of social media apps, and uses of the internet, which included accessing government services and online payment of bills. How to use online banking and UPI payments were taught on demand.
“I have tried doing that,” says 64-year-old Padmini about banking through her smartphone. Padmini, who is also an MNREGA worker, said she is afraid that she might “accidentally click something and lose money.” She had won applause when she made a video call to Minister Rajesh during an interaction at Pullampara.
Padmini bought her first smartphone, after receiving training from students who came home as part of the project. She also went on to teach the basics to her 72-year-old husband Viswanathan, a carpenter and Gulf-returnee.
“Once she taught me the basics, I bought a smartphone too and began making video calls to our grandchild,” Viswanathan says as his wife quips, “He is glued to songs on Youtube all the time.”
The oldest to pick up a smartphone in the panchayat is 99-year-old Karunakara Panicker, who is now 103. Class 7 students from the nearby Upper Primary school accompanied by their Hindi teacher Premjith visited Karunakara to teach him the basics. “Among the basics they taught was how to check the bank balance,” Premjith says.
Panicker can’t use it so well now, owing to eyesight issues, but listens to the music his 74-year-old son Rajan plays on the internet. Both father and son had learnt to use the smartphone together as part of the project. Rajan has become so equipped that he points to the vibrant red fruits hanging by his front gate and tells us that he has found them on the internet and that they were called Mahkota Dewa or the ‘fruit of heaven’. They are indeed called god’s crown because of their healing properties.
Once the 3,000-odd persons, originally found to be digitally illiterate, were trained, Pullampara was declared the first panchayat to have made the mark in 2021. At the time, Chief Minister Pinarayi said that the model should be adopted across Kerala.
From Pullampara to the rest of the state
“We took our modules to the Kerala Institute of Local Administration (KILA) – an autonomous research centre under LSGD – and prepared a more sophisticated version to be used across the state. But the basic portions remained the same,” says the LSGD assistant director Sajina.
People of all ages and genders, including more than 1,500 transgender persons, took part in the survey and the training. One-hundred-and-four-years-old Abdulla Moulavi Baqavi in Kochi is one of those who passed the survey. “He had a little bit of training from the children in our family and when the trainers of the project came, he learnt even more. He is very enthusiastic about using the smartphone to watch Youtube,” says Abdulla’s son Faizal.
The project benefited a number of women in the 30 to 60 age group, says Sajina. One of the most touching scenes she observed was the video call in sign language, between an elderly woman and an elderly man with speech and hearing disabilities.
What has been completed is only the first phase of the project, says Minister Rajesh. “This has already empowered them educationally since people mostly read news online these days and it would help them to stay informed. In the next phase, we would like to look at the possibilities of financial literacy. We will soon announce Digital Literacy 2.0.”