Every morning, 18-year-old Mohini Parmar cooks, cleans, and helps prepare her younger siblings for the day. Her father died during the COVID-19 pandemic, leaving her as the eldest child in the family. Once the household work is done, she walks 500 metres from her home in Dholpur to study at the local Digital Samvidhan Ghar.

A few years ago, a space like this did not exist in her village.

Mohini once dreamt of joining the Air Force. "My motive is only to become a soldier," she says with certainty. Preparing for the entrance exam pushed her to teach herself English from scratch because the exam required it.

Today, she says proudly, she can teach English to children up to Class 10. While she is now preparing for the Rajasthan Eligibility Examination for Teachers (REET) instead, her determination remains unchanged.

What changed was access to a place where she could learn consistently, safely, and close to home.

Mohini's experience lies at the heart of a wider transformation unfolding across Rajasthan's Dholpur district.

In the ravines of Chambal, a region long deprived of basic educational infrastructure and modern facilities, abandoned government buildings are being transformed into digital learning hubs. Students prepare for competitive examinations late into the night, women return to studying after marriage, and children who once saw cities as their only chance at opportunity are discovering that learning can exist much closer to home.

At the heart of this transformation is the Digital Samvidhan Ghar initiative, a district-wide network of community learning centres developed since 2024, under the leadership of IAS officer Nivrutti Avhad, CEO of Zila Parishad Dholpur.

What started with a few abandoned government buildings has now grown into 78 digital libraries across Dholpur, including in remote villages near the Chambal that had long lacked such facilities.

Mohini is among approximately 5,000 students who have registered at the Samvidhan Ghars, which have helped create a district-wide digital learning network across Dholpur.

Students once had to leave Dholpur to prepare

To understand why these centres matter so deeply, one must first understand Dholpur itself.

Dholpur lies on Rajasthan's eastern edge, along the Chambal River, surrounded by deep ravines, rocky land, scattered villages, and thick forests. For decades, this difficult terrain shaped both how the district was seen and how people lived.

The Chambal ravines remained cut off for years, with many villages long deprived of educational infrastructure, coaching centres, libraries, and digital access.

Even today, travelling to nearby towns for exam preparation is expensive and difficult for many families.

Against this backdrop, in Gram Panchayat Pipret near the Chambal region, sarpanch Dharmendra Singh Parmar describes the transformation unfolding around him with visible disbelief. "Jungle mein aake mangal kiya hai," he says. Meaning "prosperity has arrived in the........

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