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As we end our conversation, Rohini is eager to exchange numbers. Her fingers flit nimbly across the screen of her new smartphone and she’s adamant that I send her our photographs as soon as I have time. Rohini hasn’t been using a smartphone too long, and she’s particularly possessive about it. “I couldn’t function without it,” she confesses, as she tells me about the small bee-keeping unit she runs back in Satara, Maharashtra.
Rohini is one of the many women who claim to have been directly influenced by Google and Tata Trusts’ ‘Internet Saathi’ programme.
Since its launch in 2015, Google and Tata Trusts have spoken of expanding their Internet Saathi programme to about 300,000 villages across the length and breadth of India – hoping to make women in rural India “digitally literate”. The idea, at its barest minimum, is to place a smartphone in the hands of a woman who may have never operated one before, and encourage her to expand the horizons at her fingertips.
So far, Google claims, over 12 million women have benefited from the scheme (it has been rolled out in 12 states already) – and about 30,000 ‘internet saathis’ (women who’ve picked up the technology and are now training others) are passing on the knowledge.
Reiterates Raman Kalyanakrishnan, Head of Strategy, Tata Trusts:
Heartened by the rapidity with which this new group of internet saathis picked up digital knowledge, Google and Tata Trusts have now decided to extend the programme to create livelihood opportunities too, through internet usage. Says Chadha:
Rohini will testify to that, as she grins and tells me about how she started her bee keeping unit:
Rohini tells me how her family has now come around, but what stays with me longer is the passion with which she divulges details of her bee-keeping, gesticulating with her hands and displaying her brand new website to me with the flushed pride of a new entrepreneur.
Her enthusiasm is matched, if not surpassed, by her fellow internet saathi Madhavi from Kurnool, Andhra Pradesh. Madhavi speaks little to no English or Hindi, but through an interpreter is able to communicate to me the joys of her internet learning so far.
As Madhavi says this, she holds up her hands which are bedecked with bangles that she tells me she has designed herself. Through words passed on by an interpreter, Madhavi powerfully asserts, “Earlier, I didn’t have an identity; now, I do.”
Perhaps, FREND will help foster that identity further, and help unearth a few more glorious bee-keeping, designing, business-operating dreams. We’ll hear of them on the internet.
(At The Quint, we question everything. Play an active role in shaping our journalism by becoming a member today.)
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