Arunachal 'set' to get smart village initiative

Our Correspondent

Itanagar, April 13: Toeing the line of Andhra Pradesh for self-financing model of smart villages, Arunachal Pradesh is going have a similar initiative in the State with Chief Minister Pema Khandu, who is currently in the US, and Prof Solomon Darwin of Berkeley University agreeing ‘in-principle’ to roll out a self-financing model of smart villages by dovetailing the CM Adarsh Gram Yojana.

This ‘development’ was made on Thursday when Khandu had a one-on-one meeting with Prof Darwin and discussed a wide ranging issues on development of the State, an official report informed here today.

Prof Solomon has undertaken a self-financing model of smart villages in Andhra Pradesh for empowering the under banked and under-served sections of the population in rural areas with use of technology.

A visibly elated Khandu specifically mentioned that with a predominantly rural population in the State, empowering the villages will usher in inclusive development in the State in the truest sense of the term. Prof Solomon is the Executive Director, Garwood Centre for Corporate Innovation and currently works in UC Berkeley. He is known as ‘Father of the smart village movement’ and developed scalable models that support rural village markets by aligning global brands, start-ups and local cottage industries for a better future.

His work in Andhra Pradesh by aligning with corporate giants including Google, IBM, Ericsson, PayPal and Cisco has made the smart village movement a reality.

Earlier, the Chief Minister visited PayPal headquarters, the famed digital e-commerce platform at San Jose, where he was given an exclusive guided tour on the innovations being undertaken by PayPal and also the future of digital transactions involving very high degree of data encryption and protection of individual data, the report added.