The Vittiya Saksharta Abhiyan (VISAKA) launched by Ministry of Human Resource Development has got a tremendous response. Within first four days of launching of the campaign, more than 1 lakh students of higher educational institutions have volunteered to be associated with the campaign. Speaking to media persons in New Delhi today, Union HRD Minister, Shri Prakash Javadekar said that going by the response received so far, Government hopes that the number of volunteers will reach 25 lakh soon. The Minister said that the training of students will start from tomorrow onwards and more and more students are joining the training programme. During the training module, students will be trained about the opening of account, linking Aadhaar card with Bank account, linking Mobile to Aadhaar card and all other required information for digital literacy for transforming cash society to less cash society. They will be imparted training in Aadhaar based payment system, pre-paid card, Unified Payments Interface (UPI), Mobile wallat, Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD).

Mentioning this campaign as biggest digital transformation of country after Independence, Minister said that Government officers, Bankers and administrators will be roped in to impart the training. Students, in turn, will educate their family members and other families in their neighbourhood motivating them to go in for digital payment. He said that he himself would address about 25000 students on 20th December at Pune.

Shri Javadekar said that in the first phase, the Government is targetting 500 cities having more than one lakh population. The duration of the campaign will be for one month (12th December to 12th January). He said that many incentives are being offered by the Government for adopting digital mode of payment. HRD Ministry will be monitoring public response about this campaign on its website on daily basis. Ministry has already issued appreciation letters to all the volunteers who have associated with this campaign. The Minister said that the country has adequate wherewithal of 100 crore Aadhaar Cards, 100 crore mobiles, 120 crore saving Banking Accounts, 77 crore debit cards, 3 crore credit cards to make this digital payments campaign, a big success.