Akshaya entrepreneurs wary of the 1,000 digital Seva Kendras envisioned under the E-Kerala Project

The proposed move is to establish 1,000 digital Seva Kendras under a women’s empowerment initiative at Kerala State University and supported by the Ministry of Industry and Commerce and the Khadi and Village Industries Board, leaving behind 3,000-ODD Akshaya Entrepreneurs, a state that spreads throughout the state’s future.

The initiative will be launched on April 24 at Thiruvananthapuram Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan and Industry Minister P. Rajeeve. Kendras.

Revisiting the plan

The Ernakulam-based Akshaya Welfare Association has submitted a memorandum to Mr Rajeeve expressing concerns that the new initiative might prove the death of the Akshaya Centre. The memo cites the majority of Akshaya entrepreneurs are already women, so 95% of the employees employed by the center. The proposed new digital Seva Kendras will link thousands of women to the Akshaya project unemployed. The memorandum urges the government to revisit the plan and take steps that benefit the Akshaya project.

“Even the government authorities realise that the new digital kendras may pose a serious challenge to the Akshaya centres, but cite that the project is in an advanced stage of implementation. Already, we are staring at an existing threat thanks to stiff competition from private citizen service centres and the abysmally low service fee, which was last revised in 2018, set for the Akshaya centres. Our repeated demanded for fee revision has gone unheeded,” said Saljith, president of Akshaya Welfare Association.

However, Kerala State Rutronix sources said the delivery of electronic services is just one of the verticals of the proposed digital Seva Kendras. “Even the Akshaya Centre is not offered in the same way, the public can walk into the Centre with the help of facilitators and leverage these services on their own, thereby licensing them digitally. Compared with the Akshaya project, digital Seva Kendras can divide the digital range by digitizing the range and provide the digital range to make the digital range across the range and can be achieved through the digital range. The motto of the E-Keralam project is to achieve complete digital literacy and entrepreneurial development,” the source said.

Technical training

It is also planned to provide technical training to Akshaya entrepreneurs to scale up through Kerala Rutronix. So far, 1,260 apps have been received for setting up digital Seva Kendras, which will be reviewed before selection.

Potential entrepreneurs can utilize loan facilities through the ‘Ente Gramam’ initiative, the central government’s PMEGP program and Kerala Khadi and the Rural Industrial Council.