India: Nokia launches project to develop 500 digital villages

Nokia India announced its Smartpur project that aims to develop 500 digitally integrated villages.

Nokia has rolled out a pilot project in Haryana and Tamil Nadu with Digital Empowerment Foundation (DEF) as the implementation partner to develop 10 such villages in each state. Nina Vaskunlahti, Ambassador of Finland, inaugurated the pilot in Tain village, Nuh district, Haryana.

20 percent of households in developed countries and as many as 66 percent of households in developing countries do not have internet access, according to the International Telecom Union. Out of 4 offline billion people from developing countries include nearly one billion in India.

Nokia said the Smartpur project aims to offer digital tools to bring efficiency in daily lives, transparency in governance, economic prosperity for households and ease of access to various government services and information. The project will work under the five key areas of development – health, education, livelihood, governance and finance.

The digital project will be scaled-up to another 80 villages across various states in phase two and another 400 villages over a period of 5 years.

“The Smartpur initiative is our contribution to delivering broadband infrastructure and services to the telecom-dark areas and support the government’s vision of Digital India for a more inclusive growth,” Sanjay Malik, head of India for Nokia, said.

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