eGov-Feb-2010-[30-31]-Education for All-Role of ICT

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Education for All: Role of ICT www.sify.com

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ducation and literacy is an absolute must for any economy, especially developing and/or near-developed economy. Yes, here we are talking of India. An honest, committed and focused approach to ‘Education for All’ can make greatest difference in addressing issues like unemployment, bridging the urbanrural divide, minimising the need and role of subsidies and exhaustive socioeconomic benefit programmes, and managing in a better manner the ever growing rich-poor gap. Under ‘Education for All’, the focus needs to be on employable education. It is essential to provide international and state-of-the-art exposure to people living in rural areas. ‘Education for All’ can help in achieving urbanisation of rural. The theme needs to be employable education and ease of learning the difficult and complex subjects and concepts. Though it is a dire need of yesteryears, there have been many programmes and schemes by Government of India backed by multi-crores of rupees for the financial support; huge amount of funds are planned, released, and consumed, but ground reality is very different and far from expectations. Reasons are many and unfortunately till date, it [Education for All] is still like a dream. This has been the slogan for quite a while by entire leadership teams across political parties throughout the country. However, here is some good news, in recent times even selected industry leaders like Bharti group are catching up with education as a subject matter in their focus areas though in a small and a selected way. Yet another ray of hope, even present government is showing

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Sudhir Aggarwal

lot of focus on education as a subject. There seems to be tremendous focus on education reforms as government has certainly started talking. Role of ICT in Education Information and Communication Technology (ICT) is one great tool in conceptualising, building and implementing reforms across sectors. Large corporate houses and some of the sectors (Banking, Aviation, Telecom) have adopted this quite a while back. Department of Information and Technology (DIT) under Ministry of Communication and Information and Technology (MCIT) has conceptualised and launched innovative Mission Mode Projects (MMP) under National eGovernance Plan (NeGP). The objective of MMP under NeGP is to create an overall framework to facilitate line Ministries and departments to initiate their major ICT-enabled administrative reforms and initiatives (more details available under e-Governance on dit.gov.in). This is an attempt to enhance Government to Citizen (G2C), Government to Business (G2B), Government to Employee (G2E), Government to Government (G2G), Government to Stakeholder (G2S) respectively) experience in terms of enhanced efficiency, effectiveness, accountability, transparency, agility, evolutionary development and gradual adoption. This has a unique built-in mechanism to bring industry players on board right from conceptualisation through execution. It might be an interesting idea to include ‘Education for All’ as one of the

MMP under NeGP. Ministry of Human Resource and Development (MoHRD) would certainly need to own and drive this; however DIT and/or Planning Commission can be the facilitator. By bringing in under NeGP, it can help MoHRD by providing an institutionalised mechanism from the perspective of conceptualisation of initiatives around a framework, develop thought leadership, develop the solution, manage challenges like sustainenance; possibly one of the biggest advantage is to bring industry on board logically and meaningfully through Public- Private Partnership (PPP) model. Education is a huge subject with various facet and stakeholders attached to it like primary/ secondary/ higher education, professional education, administrative bodies, schools/ colleges/ institutions, etc. In the current NeGP MMP, there is a small cover for education through initiatives like CSC’s (Common Services Centers); however it requires a very different platform and focus to drive such a Dream. e-Governance (basically ICT) has certain non-functional natural benefits (but very important and critical in success) like replicability, expandability and scalability, availability, repeatability, reaching the masses. One of the biggest feature of ICT is to help in conceptualising the concept/ initiative in evolutionary manner and gradual adoption. Education and ICT – made for each other •

There are series of challenges attached to education in today’s context, some of them can be articulated as


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