Neha Barjatya, who is positioned as Google India Marketing Director, she is also investing her generous efforts as Chief Internet Saathi at FREND (Foundation for Rural Entrepreneurship Development), an non-profit organization which empowers women in rural India with access to information, skills and livelihood opportunities. This foundation is supported by Google and Tata Trusts to enable rural women in India to access technology. Neha covers a wide arena of topics like rural sustainability, innovation, and women empowerment in her writing.
Currently, in the event India Economic Conclave conducted by the Economic Times, she was seen expressing her views about the optimization of technology and how it can poise to be a tool which will eventually act as a catalyst in merging more rural women generating gender equity who will be self-reliant in the usage of technology, thus achieving her foundation’s active targets.
Her thoughts reflect that with the rise of technology in the present scenario, it has been observed that it has helped tremendously in removing the physical barriers that held women back. And especially, this is helping the rural women where there was lesser access to resources, information, services but with the advent of technology this access has increased only. She also said , the aim or focus of the foundation is to be “Universally Accessible“.
It is important, that women are an equal part in the technological progress, she went down the constructive lane for her foundation where she mentioned that 5-6 years from present day, when our mission to unite women set foot , only 10% of rural population had access to internet, then a program Internet Saathi was launched, under which women were trained who would go to rural villages and further share their knowledge with the same gender, initiating their internet journey.
Talking statistically, In 5-6 years, the foundation has trained 80,000 Internet Saathis who have eventually transformed the lives of 30 million rural women in 3 lakh villages. With reflection on efforts of such kind, it is important for us to realize that these efforts shouldn’t be wasted and women should keep progressing further in their respective choice of fields.
