Nivalkar Gajanan is from Gimma village of Adilabad district in Telangana. He was studying for his diploma in Industrial Training when he first learned how to operate a PC. From paying utility bills to maintaining records, and from learning about government schemes to learning about the world, the many uses of a computer and the potential it represented left him awe-struck.
In 2010, he decided to educate the people in his village about the many uses of a PC. Gajanan set up a Common Services Center (CSC) which aims to make e-governance services accessible to the common people in rural areas. For a small fee, village level entrepreneurs, who run the center, help digitally illiterate villagers use the internet to apply for government schemes and avail different government benefits.
Gajanan is inspired from the Digital India program and National Digital Literacy Mission. These two initiatives inspired Gajanan to start training government health and education workers on how to use the PC. Gajanan then presented his idea to P Keshav, sarpanch of Akoli, who readily agreed, and supported him. A month later, in January 2016, Gajanan started enrolling one member from each of the 160 households in the village. In a small room in the Gram Panchayat, he set up four of his own PCs and two Wi-Fi hotspots and an LED screen.
Next, he divided the villagers into different batches like housewives, children and farm laborers were taught in the morning, from 7am to 12 noon. Farmers were taught in the late evening. While Gajanan bore the cost of training the villagers himself, he was awarded Rs. 65,000 by the Government of India when the villagers successfully completed their assessment.
Now Today, children from the village use the PC at the center to access free tutorials online, while farmers use them to get tips and suggestions about farming. Computer knowledge has also translated into better employment opportunities for many; some of the trainees have been hired by Gajanan himself to spread digital literacy to other villages in rural Telangana.
