100 BPOs catering to women, SC/ST to come ip in Bihar: Prasad

Union minister Ravi Shankar Prasad today said 100 BPOs will be opened at Common Service Centres (CSCs) in Bihar as part of the government's efforts to empower women and people belonging to Scheduled caste and Scheduled Tribe.

"We have started programmes to open BPO centres. We will be opening smaller BPO centres of 5-10 seats for SC and ST in villages," Prasad, the minister for Electronics, IT and Law and Justice, told reporters here.

Prasad was here to address a function on 'The Vision and Mission of Dr B R Ambedkar' organised by the Electronics and IT ministry on the occasion of Ambedkar's birth anniversary.

The minister also addressed CSC Village Level Entrepreneurs on the occasion.

BPO centres have already come up in Patna and Muzaffarpur, while such centres would soon be opened in smaller cities like Samastipur, Dewaria, Ghazipur etc, he said.

Prasad also said the government is taking steps to empower the SCs and STs with technology and a special digital literacy drive on a "mission mode" will be launched soon.

Besides, the best performing Village Level Entrepreneur, run by SC and ST, will be rewarded Rs 1 lakh cash prize, Prasad said.

Emphasising on the need for increasing digital literacy in the country, the minister said the central government has set a target of making 6 crore people digitally literate under PM Digital Saksharta Abhiyan (PMGDISHA).

Of the government's target of making 6 crore people digitally literate, Prasad said 1.12 crore people have got digital training which included 23 lakh SC and 1.5 lakh ST.

He said 8.02 lakh people have been digitally trained in Bihar that includes 2 lakh people belonging to SC and ST.

Exhorting the CSCs to help in making people digitally literate, Prasad said that the NDA government has saved Rs 83,000 crore through Direct Benefit Transfer scheme by removing middlemen.

"This happened because the government opened 31 crore Jandhan accounts and integrated them with Aadhaar," he said.

Drawing an analogy between the present NDA government led by Narendra Modi and the Rajiv Gandhi government in the 1980s, Prasad said "Rajiv Gandhi used to say that merely 15 out of 100 paise would reach the beneficiary, but today, when the government sends Rs 1,000 to the beneficiary, then all of it reaches his/her accounts...This is the difference between Narendra Modi government and Rajiv Gandhi government.