The National Commission for Women (NCW) recently launched the fourth phase of the Digital Shakti Campaign, a pan-India project to digitally empower and upskill women in cyberspace. In line with its commitment to creating safe spaces for women and girls online, Digital Shakti 4.0 is focused on training women with digital skills and enabling them to stand up against any illegal/inappropriate activity online. NCW launched it in collaboration with CyberPeace Foundation and a social networking giant.
According to a press release, while addressing the audience the NCW Chairperson, Rekha Sharma, highlighted the efforts of the commission to empower women in every sphere across the nation. This new phase will prove to be a milestone in ensuring safe cyber spaces for women. Digital Shakti has been accelerating the digital participation of women by training them to use technology to their advantage and to keep themselves safe online. The project will continue to contribute towards the larger goal of fighting cyber violence against women and girls and making the Internet a safer space for them, Sharma said.
The launch was followed by an interactive panel discussion titled, “Safe Spaces Online Combatting Cyber-Enabled Human Trafficking and Combatting Other forms of Online Violence”. It offered a platform for experts from the industry, government, and academia to share opinions and address the issue of women’s safety online from several aspects and provide a holistic approach to ensure better cybersecurity for women.
Launched in June 2018, Digital Shakti aims to raise digital awareness among women in India and build resilience, and fight cybercrime in the most effective ways. Through this project, over 300,000 women have been made aware of cyber safety tips and tricks, reporting and redressal mechanisms, data privacy, and emerging technology. The third phase of the programme was started in March 2021. In this phase, a Resource Centre was also developed under the project to provide information on all the avenues of reporting in case a woman faces any cybercrime.
The government has launched several initiatives over the past few years to help increase the rate of digital literacy among all citizens as well as government officials. Earlier, OpenGov Asia reported that an e-learning portal for the Department of Posts was launched to enhance the competencies of about 400,000 rural postal service and departmental employees by providing them access to standardised training content online or in a blended campus mode. This will enable them to effectively deliver several government-to-citizen (G2C) services for enhanced customer satisfaction. The training videos and quizzes on the portal are available in 12 Indian languages.
After completing the final summative assessment, a system-generated course completion certificate will be sent to the trainee’s registered email ID automatically. Trainees can also submit feedback, ratings, and suggestions for all learning content.
