With practised ease, Sarasu’s finger glides over the smartphone screen from one video to the next, as she lists out the things she learned to do with the phone. For a while, the septuagenarian worker of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) even had a YouTube channel featuring her folk songs, which accidentally got deleted when her phone developed a technical snag.Standing in front of her modest house in the deep interiors of Pullampara panchayat in Thiruvananthapuram, she speaks of the joy of video calling her grandchild and taking photographs.
How Kerala became India’s first fully digitally literate State
| Video Credit:
The Hindu
In another ward in the same panchayat, S. Boban, a veteran farmer, has just prepared the ground for black pepper cultivation using PVC pipes, a novel method he learned from YouTube. His only complaint is that now he gets to see too many videos on black pepper cultivation on his timeline, due to the algorithms.Sarasu from Pullampara using her smartphone
