Vaishali Ghadi, Rasika Parab, Anikita Malgaonkar and four other girls aged under ten years key in their names in English and save the computer file with an acronym made up of the initials of each.

Nothing strange. Except that they’re village schoolgirls from Malgaon, a tiny village in coastal rural Maharashtra, who should have been quite innocent about computing at their age, and on the wrong side of the digital divide.

They would have, had it not been for the counter-intuitive thinking of NIIT chief scientist Dr Sugata Mitra, the Delhi-based ex-IIT solid-state physicist who launched on a seemingly crazy experiment to see if poor and rural children could learn computers almost intuitively.

Mitra earned attention globally when he first placed a computer-in-a-kiosk alongside a Delhi slum, and tracked how surprisingly much slum-children could learn by themselves. This project has since been extended to other parts of India.

Minimally invasive
Calling his method ‘minimally-invasive education’ (a term ‘borrowed’ from the world of medicine, as he puts it), Mitra has now taken his experiment to coastal Maharashtra’s Sindhudurg district.

This is a rain-swept, sparsely-populated green setting just north of Goa, from where people have, for generations now, been migrating out to the nearby commercial megapolis Mumbai.

“We’ve got 42 computers in 13 physical locations so far. These include 31 in Delhi, 10 in coastal Maharashtra and one in Uttar Pradesh. We now plan to have 66 more such computers in 22 more MIE (minimally-invasive education) kiosks by 2003-end,” Mitra told India Computes!

Rugged computing
Next, he wants to work out the design that computers require to withstand the high-humidity, dust and heat of tough rural settings.

This would hopefully help to search out commercial models that would sustain such ventures. This could cut deeply into the current form of not just Indian education but even the mode of education sold to hundred of thousands of students by franchisees of the NIIT computer training firm where he is a senior vice-president and head of the Centre for Research in Cognitive Systems.

Keeping afloat is no cakewalk, though, in this trying terrain.

Abhishek Shirshat, director at NIIT’s Sawantwadi centre, fights with a computer’s software to get it going at a village 40 kms away from Malgaon. Some schools reported they didn’t have power since the previous day, while at another the phone was dead for days.

“This machine was built to be put in air-conditioned offices. It will take at least two years before you could write a paper on what needs to be done to keep a PC running amidst the heat, dust and humidity in this area,” says Mitra.

But, with a battery back-up, young boys kept playing a game called ‘Escaping Monkey’. As the children fooled around with the computers, they were also learning.

Surprising results
In some cases, the teachers are pleasantly surprised by this project, which has drawn funding support from financial institutions and others. Take the case of Shamsuddin Attar, the computer teacher at Shirgaon’s high school. Says he: “When I started teaching [the syllabus], the children had already learnt part of it. So I didn’t need to teach it again. I told them about the CPU (central processing unit), keyboard, mouse and they said they’ve already seen it. They were more enthusiastic to learn about the operating of the computer.”

Arun Chavan (13), from the same school in whose courtyard sits a kiosk with a couple of computers, explains how you can play music with Real Player and Winamp. Other boys gather around one computer the other is being repaired as they shout instructions to each other over what to do next with the desktop that has become a plaything.

“It seems to show more than what we intended to show,” says Mitra, who did his M.Sc. in solid-state physics in 1973 at IIT-Delhi and later his Ph.D. “We intended showing that children can teach themselves how to use a computer without adult instruction. What we seem to be ending up showing is that children can teach themselves lots of things without adult instruction.”

Mitra speak : Looking back, looking ahead... What makes him proud: The realisation that it now seems to be much more than what we started out to show... Dr SUGATA MITRA What the initial goals were: That children can teach themselves how to use a computer without intervention. What we seem to be ending up at is that children can teach themselves a lot of (other) things without adult intervention. On what this could mean for our educational setup: In a worst case, it would mean substantial change in the way in which computer usage is taught to children. Very substantial changes. In a best case, it could help evolve an alternate model to primary education. What will perhaps actually evolve would be like the truth which lies somewhere in between. On response the project has evoked since 1999: There has been a lot of excitement among education reformers, and from off-the-track quarters. There has also been a lot of interest (not so much excitement) from the field of mainstream education. Then, there has been plenty of unsolicited media interest. Lastly, there was a mixture of disbelief and helplessness from the educational administration. They came to see, but didn’t know whether to believe it, and were undecided about what to do about it, because of the huge formal educational infrastructure that is already in place. One reaction too including from NGOs was disinterest, even verging on disdain, for the whole activity. On the response from slums and fields: In terms of the children, from what we’ve completed so far, it has been rather uniform, whether in slum areas in Delhi or in rural fishing-farming villages of Maharashtra and elsewhere. But that’s the purpose of the whole exercise. To show that it is uniform and that the kids can learn by themselves. On the students' learning curve: Roughly, it takes them one hour to learn basic operations in some cases, even as little as fifteen minutes. Then it takes them one day to find the things they like, like paint or games. In one month’s time, everyone knows all of that. Behavioural changes start showing up around that time. There’s the business of self-organising (of how to share the PCs), or setting norms, and the separation of boys and girls as computer users.