Nokia, the Finnish telecoms company, has announced the expansion of its Smartpur programme in Jammu & Kashmir, India. The programme aims to integrate technology into the daily lives of people living in remote villages. Nokia has opened 24 new Smartpur centres across various Panchayat jurisdictions in the districts of Samba and Anantnag. These centres will provide licensed local entrepreneurs with the facilities to make essential services accessible at the village level, connecting people with five essential pillars of development: education, health, livelihood, governance and financial inclusion.
The Smartpur programme is implemented by two of Nokia’s nonprofit partners, Save the Children and Digital Empowerment Foundation. Nokia has designed the programme with sustainability, scalability, replicability and large-scale impact in mind. In the last year, the programme has been expanded to 90 more villages, increasing the number of Smartpur centres to 350 villages across India in the states of Andhra Pradesh, Assam, Haryana, Jammu and Kashmir, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Telangana and Uttar Pradesh. Around 30 Smartpur centres in Rajasthan, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh have become self-sustaining in the same period.
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The Smartpur programme has been designed to empower villages to become more sustainable and self-reliant. Nokia’s flagship social impact program aims to enable villagers to access basic services such as education and healthcare, as well as to support livelihoods, governance and financial inclusion.
Last year, Nokia received Bharti Foundation's Silver Award for Social Initiative (India), and in April 2022, the company established a Smartpur centre in the Palli region with Save the Children India (Bal Raksha Bharat) to provide services across all of its five pillars. The centre was visited by the Honourable Prime Minister, who was impressed by the work undertaken and provided valuable suggestions for further strengthening the programme and establishing linkages with Government initiatives.
Amit Marwah, Head of Marketing & Corporate Affairs at Nokia India, said, “As part of our larger commitment to local communities, we are facilitating connectivity and digitisation to further positive socio-economic, educational and health impacts in India by leveraging core strengths to address the urgent needs of the underprivileged populations. We derive great pride from the fact that we have been able to keep our promise and scale up from one to twenty-five Smartpur centres in Jammu and Kashmir in a year. We are thankful to the local administration for all their assistance and encouragement.”
The Honourable Lt Governor of J&K, Shri Manoj Sinha, expressed hope that Nokia would be able to establish at least two Smartpur centres in the remaining districts of the state, acknowledging the potential of the programme.
