CSCs complete digital training of over 10 lakh people in rural areas

New Delhi: The common service centres (CSCs) have reached a new milestone by digitally training more than 10 lakh people in the rural areas, the ministry of information technology said on Saturday.

“As of today, the CSCs have trained more than 10 lakh people. Three to four days ago, the figure was around five lakhs which means that within these few days CSCs have trained another 5 lakh people,” said Ravi Shankar Prasad, IT and law minister, while addressing the media at the DigiDhan Mela.

In an attempt to promote digital transactions and to educate the citizens on the various methods of cashless payments, the IT ministry has organized the DigiDhan Mela, a two-day event.

“It feels really nice to see the enthusiasm amongst the people about digital payments. 29 banks and 18 mobile wallets have participated in this event,” he said.

More than 20-25 institutions, including schools and colleges, are expected to attend the event. Around 3,000 people visited on the first day of the event.

“We plan to organize such events for the other cities and districts with the help of urban development departments and private sectors as well,” said Prasad.

A total of 476 districts, 1,491 blocks and more than 33,230 merchants have already been covered under the digital education programme for rural areas.

“We aim to digitally train more than 1.20 crore people. Other than this, the target is to train around 20 lakh shopkeepers and 14 lakh traders as well,” he added.

During the two-day event, assistance is also being extended to citizens for opening their bank accounts, to enroll them into Aadhaar, and to enable their existing accounts into Aadhaar enabled payment system (AEPS) accounts.

The participants at the DigiDhan event include telecom companies like Airtel, Reliance Jio, popular social networking platform Facebook, transportation network companies, AEPS vendors, department of Post, merchants (through marketing associations), co-operatives like Kendriya Bhandar and organised retail fruits and vegetable chains like Safal, Mother Dairy among others.

Disclaimer: This information has been collected through secondary research and IBEF is not responsible for any errors in the same.