With 48 percent of the Indian population being illiterate, and 100 million school age children not getting a schooling, there is broad policy consensus that the only way India will get educated is if IT is used to deliver it. But cost and technology choice issues are still big hurdles to the IT enablement of Indian education says Shipra Arora.

India spends a mere 3.8 percent of its GDP on education, compared to 9 percent in many developed nations, and 6 percent on average for the world as a whole. Not surprisingly then, some 45 percent of India’s population is still illiterate and an estimated 100 million school age children either never go to school or drop out before finishing. Though there are signs that this dismal situation is about to change—a Cabinet Committee has approved an amendment to the constitution that will make school education a fundamental right—actually reaching quality education to remote rural areas cost effectively is not merely a matter of money. Many educational experts are convinced that the only way quality education can be delivered to the masses cost-effectively is to leverage information technology for education on a large scale, if only because finding teaching resource persons in remote locations is a serious problem.

Computers and the Internet, connected via VSATs, fibre optic cables, WILL, or copper telephone lines make it possible to deliver text, speech and even video to remote areas; costs of such infrastructure can vary from as little as Rs 50,000 per terminal to as much as Rs 200,000 currently, depending on what last mile technology is used. Yet, developments in fibre optics, falling PC prices, and the imminent price war for bandwidth signal an environment in which per terminal prices could drop to as little as Rs 25,000. Comments S. Ramakrishnan, senior director & head-education and research division, Ministry of Information Technology, “There is broad agreement that use of computers enhances the quality of education in schools and colleges. Fortunately, the declining price of PCs and networking devices makes it economically feasible for countries such as India to use IT to deliver quality education to previously unreached populations and to enhance the quality of education in existing teaching institutions. IT enabled education and IT enabled distance education will become commonplace in the future.”

Certainly, IT enablement of university level education brings big quality and accessibility benefits, and J R Arora, project director, School of Information Technology, Jawahar Lal Nehru University, predicts that India will follow the global trend of leveraging IT for higher education on a big scale in the foreseeable future. Says Arora, “Information sharing is critical to the process of raising educational standards, and if universities are interconnected through IT enabled networks, they will be able to share information more easily and thus raise standards rapidly. We see this happening elsewhere in the world, and efforts are underway to replicate this in India as well.”

This optimism is no mere pious hope. An array of government initiatives are actively pushing for the IT enablement of school and university education in India on an unprecedented scale. For instance, the Ministry of Human Resource Development’s allocations for IT enablement of education and distance education have been upped massively to Rs 450 crores for strengthening of computing and networking infrastructure in Category II and Rs 700 crore in Category III institutions over the next three years. Compare this to the cumulative expenditure of Rs 200 crore on ‘IT in education efforts’ over the last 20 years. In a separate programme being funded by MoHRD, known as Kendriya Vidyalaya Sangathan, 850 Kendriya Vidyalaya schools are to be connected via the Internet to leading urban schools with which they will share experiences and information.

But the effort to IT enable education goes beyond this, at least on paper. A Working Group on Information Technology for Masses was constituted by the Government of India in May 2000, which emphasised the use of IT for education and literacy to address the chronic problems in this area. Early this year, the Group issued a White Paper which states that ‘in a large country like India, technologies, such as distance learning, need to be used in a major way to address the problem of limited educational material and resources for use in different parts of the country’. It has recommended that i)Computer education facilities be set up in rural areas by identifying at least 10 secondary schools in each of the 6000 development blocks in the country by 2003 with each school maintaining a PC to student ratio of at least 1:20 with minimum of 10 PCs in a school; ii) All schools with computer education facilities should have Internet connectivity so that vast educational resources already available and to be developed by schools themselves could be shared amongst them.

University education too is to get a booster dose of IT. The MoHRD has drafted a set of recommendations to build digital libraries and interconnect 50 Category II and 200 Category III institutions. This will expand the Department of Electronics (DoE)’s existing educational backbone network called ERNET (Education and Research Network) which already connects premier educational and research located institutions in major cities. University Grants Commission, the apex policy and funding agency for higher ion in India, also plans to build a VSAT and Terrestrial Network to connect all universities under its umbrella in a scalable WAN, wherein even remote areas can be covered as easily as urban locations. Says Sharanjit Singh, EO-Computer, UGC,” This is an ambitious project that will permit Data Transfer, Internet Access, Video Conferencing, and Distance Learning programmes at all major Indian universities.”

And while MoHRD is busy implementing its plan to IT enable school and college education, another government body, Technology Information Forecasting and Assessment Council (TIFAC), which falls under MoIT, has drafted an independent initiative to set up 100 super computing facilities in colleges and even schools over the next 2 years in a bid to develop high level computing expertise across regions.

Yet, while there is wide agreement that IT must be used in education, not every one has agreed on what specific technology choices are appropriate for India. While TIFAC pushes supercomputers into colleges, professional educators think the best approach is to use simple, robust technology which is also cheap. Says Ajit Kumar Motwani, director-technical, Educational Consultants India (a consulting arm of MoHRD), “In the Indian context, we have to remember that large parts of the population live in areas where even basic infrastructure is not available. Cost is also a critical consideration. Using VSATs and high tech networks to connect schools is very expensive. We believe that it makes more sense to avoid networking altogether and rely on simple CD-ROMs for delivery of educational content to schools, because it is much cheaper and serves the same purpose.”

Efforts to develop CD based courseware for schools is already underway, with the government funded National Council of Educational Research and Training implementing a project to convert large tracts of video course ware onto CD formats. Several projects to put video based course ware for university level courses onto CDs and even onto the net are also in progress. The Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Delhi is in the process of converting 35-40 full courses available on video cassettes into CD format, which will allow for random access as well as interactivity. According to Kushal Sen, head-education technology services centre, IIT Delhi, the courseware once available in the digitised format, will be put on the institute’s centralised server and will be available to students at IIT and even to students in 30-40 other institutions across the country. Similar projects are being developed by IIT Mumbai and IIT Kharagpur.

Indira Gandhi National Open University, the Indian pioneer in, and largest university level distance education provider, in the country, already used television broadcast technology to deliver some of its courses to students around the country, and has built two way audio-and-video conferencing facilities at 175 nodes across India to facilitate interaction between faculty and students. Its efforts to put courseware on the net and on CDs under its ‘Virtual Campus Initiative’ are now well under way. Says Man-ohar Lal, director, School of Computer and Information Sciences, IGNOU, “The virtual campus seeks to combine the net, teleconferencing and broadcasting into a composite learning experience.”

Policy guidelines to use IT for education are now in place. Myriad initiatives to experiment with e-education are also underway. What remains to be done is to develop an appropriate mix of technologies and teaching methodologies for IT enabled education, and to find the funding for mass implementation. That, of course is the Rs 40,000 crore question mark that hangs over education in India.