Vidya Vahini: Redefining education

The government's initiative to connect 60,000 Indian schools is aimed at providing a thrust to computer-aided learning for rural students. For long, the issue of digital divide has assumed center stage in the minds of policy thinkers with various projects geared towards addressing the issue. ‘Vidya Vahini’ is one such ambitious project launched by the department of IT along with ERNET, in an attempt to explore how IT can be integrated into the learning process of school children. Although there are other projects on similar lines mostly in the private sector, Vidya Vahini is different because it takes up the cause of the rural students.

The project which was conceived a year and a half ago in the corridors of the IT ministry, received a lot of attention when it was launched early this month by the PM Atal Bihari Vajpayee in Lucknow, his home constituency. Undoubtedly, the scale of the project is ambitious -- 60,000 senior secondary schools to be connected at an estimated cost of Rs 6,500
crore.

Integrating IT into the curriculum of rural schools and providing for better educational infrastructure has always been a major preoccupation with Vajpayee. In 1998, the PM set up a Task Force and subsequently ‘Operation Knowledge’ was launched.

In 2001, in his Independence Day speech the PM again referred to the issue of disbursing quality education. "Our objective is freedom from distance. We are determined to link all the villages of India not only with good roads but also good telecom and Internet services," he said.

The project currently encompasses 147 schools under its fold in seven districts spread across different states. These districts are Lucknow, Gandhinagar, Allahabad, Hazaribagh in Jharkhand, Kuppam in Andhra Pradesh, South 24-Parganas in West Bengal and Parlivaijnath in Maharashtra. Each state government chose 21 senior secondary schools in the respective district and provided the ministry with space within the premises. The ministry installed ten computers in each school, a LAN server, a 5 KVA UPS, a networked printer and connectivity through VSAT. In addition a 29 inch TV connected to a PC was also set up in a separate room, so that multimedia based teaching can be facilitated. The schools were also provided with digital content for all the classes to supplement their learning.

Dr Gulshan Rai, Executive Director, ERNET and one of the main proponents of the project described Vidya Vahini as an ‘an attempt at integrating IT into everyday learning. Vidya Vahini is not about computer literacy but is more veered towards computer-aided learning’. The teacher is a major component in ensuring the success of the program so that they can adopt computer-aided tools in curriculum delivery. Students would also benefit in knowledge enhancement by using the electronic media for information gathering. The project also envisages peer-to-peer connectivity amongst students, so that any knowledge base built by students in one corner of the country can be shared across different locations. 

Content development in local language would be a major thrust area of the project. The investment in each school worked out to be Rs 10 lakh with the total project cost working out to be Rs 15 crore. Praful Kumar, Additional Director, at the Ministry and a person who has had hands-on experience with the project said, "We have been able to manage such low costs as a lot of purchase came at heavy discounts. Three Indian companies have provided free content, which would have been a major cost. Both Microsoft and Intel gave us special discounts. Even the Department of Space has provided free transponder space for the project." The entire project, including ensuring constant connectivity, has been managed by HCL Infosystems, who would also provide support for a period of two years. The three vendors who provided free content include Super Infosoft Pvt Ltd, Vision InfoSolutions Pvt Ltd and JIL Information Technology. Britannica Encyclopedia also provided free content. The content is both teacher-centric as well as student-centric. This means that content has voice overlay and students can access the content online and listen to the lecture. Teachers can also access the content in a classroom kind of environment and explain it to students through equipment like color TV. 

The content is loaded on ERNET servers and some portion is also expected to be loaded on individual school servers. Finally, Intel undertook the initiative of training teachers and equipping them with necessary skill-sets at each district, training over 700 teachers in batches

The training process is ongoing with the aim to train all the teachers in the project.

The government hopes to involve the private sector in some way to fund the project expansion since the investment requirement is huge. Right now, the ministry is exploring various kinds of possible partnerships by which the private sector could be roped into a project of this size. Analysts said that besides its primary intent of spreading quality education through IT deployment, a project of this nature could have spin off benefits like spurring domestic IT spending and enabling local employment.

Balaka Baruah Aggarwal

(CNS)