Valapad village in the Thrissur District of Kerala was officially declared as a fully e-literate village on March 22, 2017 at a function held in Valapad. The declaration was made by Shri E.K. Thomas, President of the Valapad Panchayat, and it follows the successful ground level implementation of “Project E-Valapad” initiated by Manappuram Finance Ltd. in partnership with the Panchayat.
Project E-Valapad aimed at spreading digital financial literacy in shops and household in the Valapad village area. For this purpose, a dedicated team consisting of employees of the company, ward members and a batch of trained volunteer students from the nearby S.N. College Nattika fanned out to all the wards. They went door-to-door imparting training to all the households in the use of various online means of payments and other financial transactions. Their mission was to ensure that at least one member of each household would become e-literate in terms of being conversant with the different platforms of making cashless transactions. Over a period of 5 days, the volunteers managed to cover 8,742 households out of a total of 9,809 households.
With the successful conclusion of the project, Valapad can now lay claim to the status of a fully digitally literate village. The village has an area of 16.33 sq. km with a population of about 35,000, a literacy rate of 86.5%, and with the BPL population at 40% (2011 census).
Manappuram Finance Ltd., a leading NBFC rooted in Valapad, is committed to spreading digital financial literacy among communities it is engaged with. Recently, the company’s officials had experienced first-hand some of the ground level difficulties faced by the local people in transitioning to cashless mode of transactions. Manappuram’s MD & CEO, Shri V.P. Nandakumar, conceived Project E-Valapad and directed a team within the company to approach Valapad Panchayat for implementation.