Ahead of the Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections 2022, the Yogi Adityanath led government has come up with a campaign to distribute smartphones and tablets to final year students of graduation and above from December 25, which is the birth anniversary of former Prime Minister of India Late Atal Bihari Vajpayee.
The Uttar Pradesh government will distribute the smartphones and tablets to around one lakh final year students of B.Tech, B.A, B.Sc, MA, ITI, MBBS, MD, M.Tech, PhD and skill development course, among others. The distribution will take place at Bharat Ratna Atal Bihari Vajpayee Ekana Stadium in Lucknow.
The step has been taken to escalate the Bhartiya Janta Party’s outreach among youth ahead of the Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections. A large number of students will be participating in the event from every district of the state, including girls.
Earlier, the Yogi Adityanath government had announced to distribute free smartphones and tablets to one crore youngsters in order to “make them technically sound”. In the first phase of the plan, the Chief Minister will distribute 60,000 smartphones and 40,000 tablets.
Giving details of the plan, Special secretary, IT and electronics, Kumar Vineet said that over 38 lakh youths have registered on DigiShakti portal- which was launched by the state government to provide its schemes and scholarships. The registration for the free smartphone scheme is still open on the portal.
The state government has placed an order for the procurement of smartphones and tablets at the GeM (Government e-Marketplace) portal. Companies like Lava, Samsung and Acer will be supplying the smartphones and tablets. They will supply around 17.75 lakh mobiles and tablets before December 24.
The total cost of the project in the first phase is around Rs 2,035 crore. The state government has placed an order for 10.5 lakh smartphones. Each smartphone is for Rs 10,740. As for the tablets the state government has ordered around 7.20 lakh tablets at the rate of Rs 12,606 each. (Jagran)
