Digital Shakti 4.0: NCW launches pan-India project for making women digitally skilled

New Delhi: National Commission for Women (NCW) launched the fourth phase of the Digital Shakti Campaign, a pan-India project that aims to digitally empower and skill women and girls in cyberspace. In keeping with its commitment to creating safe spaces for women and girls online, Digital Shakti 4.0 focuses on empowering women to be digitally skilled and aware of the importance of standing up to illegal/inappropriate online behaviour. According to a press release from the Ministry of Women and Child Development, NCW launched it in collaboration with CyberPeace Foundation and Meta. While addressing the audience, NCW Chairperson Rekha Sharma mentioned the Commission's ongoing efforts to empower women across the country, according to the press release.

She said, "This new phase will prove to be a milestone in ensuring safe cyber spaces for women. Digital Shakti has been accelerating the digital participation of women and girls by training them to use technology to their advantage and to keep themselves safe online. I believe the project will continue to contribute towards the larger goal of fighting cyber violence against women and girls and making the internet a safer space for them."The launch was followed by an interactive panel discussion on "Safe Spaces Online Combatting Cyber-enabled Human Trafficking & Combatting Other forms of Online Violence" in order to provide keen opinions from experts from the Industry, Government, and Academia to address the issue of online women safety from all tangents and provide the whole approach to ensure better women safety online.

Sunitha Krishnan, General Secretary, Prajwala, Ashutosh Pande, Senior Research Officer, NCW, Pavan Duggal, advocate, Supreme Court of India and Advisor, CPF, Veerendra Mishra, AIG, SISF, Madhya Pradesh Police and Advisor, NCW, Preeti Chauhan, Director-Operations, CPF participated in the discussion. Digital Shakti started in June 2018 to help women across the nation to raise the awareness level on the digital front, to build resilience, and fight cybercrime in the most effective ways. Through this project, over 3 lakh women across India have been made aware of cyber safety tips and tricks, reporting and redressal mechanisms, data privacy and usage of technology for their benefit.

The third phase of the program was started in March 2021 with the launch at Leh by NCW Chairperson in the presence of Lieutenant Governor Radha Krishna Mathur and Jamyang Tsering Namgyal, MP, Ladakh. In the third phase, a Resource Center was also developed under the project to provide information on all the avenues of reporting in case a woman faces any cybercrime.

(With ANI inputs)