New Delhi: "Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU) is set to educate & train Below Poverty Line (BPL) youth in six states of the country - UP, Bihar, Assam, West Bengal, Orissa and Tamil Nadu," announced IGNOU Vice Chancellor Professor VN Rajasekharan Pillai.

Five vocational training and educational programmes have been identified for online delivery.

These are certificate programmes in Computer Basics, Advanced Computing, Job Training and Interview Etiquette, along with a Diploma in Advanced Computing.

The proposed programmes will be offered online from application to certification stages.

The programmes will be conducted through a Common Service Centre (CSC) in each village panchayat office at the six selected states of Assam, Orissa, West Bengal, Bihar , UP and Tamil Nadu.

IGNOU has signed a Memorandum of Agreement with SREI Sahaj e-village Ltd., a Kolkata based company, which is implementing the CSC project in six short-listed states.

Sahaj is setting up one ICT enabled centre per 10,000 of rural population. They have already obtained a mandate from the Department of Information Technology (DIT) to set up over 27,000 CSCs at these states at the village panchayat level, within the current fiscal year.

Teachers from nearby areas are being hired to teach and guide the IGNOU students in every village panchayat.

The concept of CSCs is especially helpful to women and children of the villages and the BPL families who for various socio-economic reasons can't travel far for attending schools or training institutes.

The IGNOU certificate programmes are for six months each, while the diploma programme will be for a year. After clearing the certificate or the diploma programme, the successful candidates will be given employment.

The students will also be given opportunities to enroll for the programmes of IGNOU on a flexi-mode of learning system.

According to Prof. Pandav Nayak, the Officer on Special Duty (OSD) for the Regional Institute of Vocational Education and Training-East Zone (RIVET-EZ) project, "RIVET is a part of IGNOU initiatives to provide education at the grassroots. For the eight states in the Northeast, a RIVET type IGNOU Institute of Vocational Education and Training (IIVET) has already been made functional at Shillong and Meghalaya. Four more RIVETS will soon be set up for other zones of the country."