Rekha Kumari from Ramgarh, Jharkhand belongs to poor family background and her entire family is fully dependent on cultivation and farming. She has two small kids including a father-in-law and mother-in-law in her house. Her husband works as a farmer during the rainy season and rest of the months he works as migrant labour.
Prior to joining the Digital Sarthak programme, she used to spend most of her time looking after her house and children and used to feel annoyed with herself as she wasn’t able to be productive and earn some time on her own.
The income of her husband was minimal and uncertain due to which there was financial stress in her home. Before joining this program, she underwent digital literacy training programmes being run by DEF in another district. This helped in improving her knowledge of digital skills and be ready to take up any opportunity that comes up in the near future. Nearly after three months of digital training, she was selected as a Digital Sarthak and received one smartphone and a printer to run her own centre.
Through this project, she got a responsibility to digitally train one hundred women entrepreneurs from her region and for this work, she will get a satisfactory stipend of Rs 28,000 at the completion of the entire training schedule.
The Digital Sarthak program happens to prove as a very significant step in her life. She got the opportunity to establish a digital centre in her locality; secondly, she got the opportunity to learn various functionalities and uses of a smartphone, thirdly she received the necessary support from the programme to establish her new centre, fourthly she will get a good amount for training and digital services being provided and lastly she will able to create her own contact with the community people while training in the outfield, which will also help in creating outreach for her centre.
Above all, she was previously unemployed and she got a job and responsibility to deal with and more importantly, she will have a source of livelihood which will provide her assistance to uplift her living standard. People of her locality have great advantages of using the digital services and government benefit schemes facilities through her centre.
Previously she didn’t know to operate a smartphone and also not aware of digital services procedures, but after receiving the training, now she is capable to run her own centre successfully without any help.
