Digital Ekal to support Digital India Mission

Ekal Digital Mission:

Ekal is a movement to reach out to the people who are at the bottom of pyramid and not privileged to have access to quality education, health care, sustainable livelihood and equal opportunities to grow. When the movement started inspired by Swami Vivekananda vision when he said “If a child can not come to school, school must reach to her” and with this philosophy, Ekal Model of informal and activity based learning was conceived in late eighties. Now after more than three decades, the challenges of access remain in terms of quality education, continuous learning, health care and livelihood opportunities. Ekal is a story which has always evolved with the community and solutions have always emerged from the bottom of the pyramid.

To accelerate its continuous efforts to make bridges for providing better connectivity to rural & tribal communities, Ekal understood the need and scope of using Information Technology (IT) & Internet to overcome barrier of physical connectivity to achieve many developmental goals. The Ekal Digital Mission is nothing but a step forward of the same philosophy with which this journey started of reaching out to the remotest villages and link communities with better opportunities. This is also step forward in realizing the dream of Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam when he envisioned the idea of PURA (Providing Urban Amenities in Rural Areas) where he laid down the importance of four types of connectivity namely Physical Connectivity, Knowledge Connectivity, Electronic Connectivity & Economic Connectivity. Ekal has been working tirelessly to improve connectivity on all aspects except physical which is the mandate of respective governments. Ekal Digital Mission is a step forward wherein we will be accelerating the process of connectivity in terms of knowledge, Electronic and Economic.

Objectives of Ekal Digital Mission:

1. Establishment of Information Network to existing initiatives in education, Gramothan Resource Centre, Health, and livelihood
2. Real time information across network that means an Ekal Information Highway (EIH) connecting more than 100 thousand villages.  
3. Using ICT as enabler to gradually transform the Ekal Pedagogy and Methodology into e-content in the form of e-books, education videos and social games.
4. Using IT & Internet to provide Digital Skills to rural & tribal youth to make them employable and digitally literate.
5. Ensuring that all full-time volunteers and teachers are digitally literate.
6. Engagement of local communities for awareness and imparting basic digital skills which can be used to improve their livelihood opportunities like selling products and produce through online platforms and get direct market linkages.
7. Using social media as a tool to reach out and make the rural and tribal communities and interact with global audience.
8. Using IT & Internet, providing better health care in the remotest areas.
9. To spread awareness and train local communities for Financial Micromanagement using technology.
10. To connect IT service centres with local communities and also empower local youth to open such IT community centres (Ekal Seva Kendra) as per the need.

Ekal has been working on the above mentioned objectives since 2015 and a substantial progress has been achieved so far. Some of the path breaking initiative Ekal has taken and some of them are:

• Setting up of Computer Training Labs across Gramothan Resource Centres
• Ekal-on-Wheel
• Ekal e-Shiksha