Lucknow, 27 July: The Uttar Pradesh government’s Micro, Small & Medium Enterprises (MSME) and Export Promotion Department inked a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Koo App to assist the ‘One District, One Product’ (ODOP) project.
Koo is a microblogging platform developed in India enabling Indians all over the world to consume information and express themselves in their native languages.
This app grew in popularity as a result of the spat between the central government and microblogging juggernaut Twitter, and the platform aspires to become the country’s largest microblogging platform in the near future. However, per the provisions of the MoU, Koo will utilize its platform to educate and inform its consumers about ODOP content and solutions in ten different languages.
The platform will also purchase ODOP gifts to be used as corporate gifts. Yogi Adityanath, the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, launched ODOP in 2018 with the purpose of promoting indigenous and specialized goods and crafts. @UP ODOP is the ODOP handle in the Koo App.
The flagship initiative will assist craftsmen in improving the quality of their products as well as marketing and branding in order to increase their earnings and create additional jobs. The newly signed Memorandum of Understanding will allow the UP welfare ODOP’s programs and projects to reach a broader audience and be better articulated, particularly to people who do not understand English. It will also help local artists increase their consumer base and trade across the country.
According to a 2019 survey performed by Lok Foundation and Oxford University and supervised by the Center for Monitoring Indian Economy, English is utilized more in urban parts of India than in rural areas. Only 3% of rural claimed to be able to communicate in English, compared to 12% of urban.
A graph in Uttar Pradesh showed that between 2.4 and 4.3 percent of the population spoke English. The MoU, however, was signed and exchanged by Navneet Sehgal, IAS, Additional Chief Secretary, Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises and Export Promotion, Government of Uttar Pradesh, and Aprameya Radhakrishna, Co-Founder and CEO, Koo.
“This partnership with Koo will help market our ODOP products to a bigger audience and stimulate debates about ODOP in numerous regional languages,” Sehgal says.
Radhakrishna remarked at the ceremony that the state has emerged as a pioneer in marketing local products abroad through the ODOP project, which is now being duplicated by the central government and other states throughout the country. “It’s a pleasure for us to be able to aid local artists by taking their trade and spreading it to the rest of India in multiple languages,” he added.
