The chief minister of Andhra Pradesh Chandrababu Naidu has asked his officials to ensure that the state achieves 100% literacy by 2019. He made this statement while addressing the collectors’ conference.

As per the 2011 census the literacy rate of Andhra Pradesh stood at about 67.66%, which was an improvement over the 60.47%, which was clocked a decade ago. Kerala holds the record for the highest literacy rate in the country with 93.91% followed by Mizoram where 91.58% people are literate.

As per Naidu, it also needs to be ensured that arrangements are made so that whenever a child attains the school going age, he/she is made to go to one. Other proposals in the field of education include, starting 4000 cloud-based virtual classrooms spread across 60 schools. The deadline to implement this scheme is 15th March. Apart from this every department has been asked to appoint an IOT (internet of things) coordinator to cope with the emerging technology.

Going by the recent policies of the state government, Andhra Pradesh, if all goes per plan, might emerge as one of the leading Indian states when it comes to technological advancements.

It was reported in October that the Andhra Pradesh government was aiming towards attracting $2 billion in IT investments which might yield about 1 lakh jobs in the sector. Besides this, Chandrababu Naidu had claimed that it was a priority to integrate technology and agriculture. Naidu thus requested that technology be provided to transform agriculture into a profitable sector.

Incidentally it was Microsoft founder Bill Gates who responded to this request by Naidu by stating that a two-pronged approach is needed to increase productivity of small farmers, and later connect them to the markets.

It has also been reported that Naidu has claimed that Vizag would emerge as the major centre for blockchain technology in the next few years, after describing it as the new age technology.

We had recently reported that blockchain in context of cryptocurrency is a decentralised public ledger, which literally means a chain consisting of blocks. Here one block denotes a new transaction and once it is complete, it is linked to the other existing transactions, thereby forming a chain.