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Journalism of Courage
It’s the last day of class. This evening, 40 teachers will make their way back from Dehradun to their village schools in Almora and Bageshwar districts of Uttaranchal, taking with them a new-found familiarity with computers. The government hopes they will spread this knowledge among colleagues and students.
‘‘Earlier we did feel a certain deficiency. We felt if we also lived in a city we could have had access to computers,’’ says Shiv Singh Bist from Almora, who has completed his 15-day training at the Microsoft IT Academy in Dehradun.
But he did not have to move to the city. The Uttaranchal government’s Aarohi project brought computers to villages.
The road ahead was difficult — literally. Many schools lay some distance from the roadhead. The PCs made the final few kilometres on stubborn, machine-unfriendly mules, who tried hard to throw off their burden. The schoolchildren were more enthusiastic, often carrying the machines to their schools.
Project Aarohi’s aim is to impart basic computer education to all government and government-aided schools, from classes VI-XII. The monthly cost to the student: Rs 10.
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• Uttaranchal government project aims to provide four computers to every school in the state |
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Says Amarendra Sinha, secretary, planning, EAP and urban development (he was Uttaranchal’s IT secretary till two months ago): ‘‘We want to bridge the digital divide. We want to establish an IT industry but we need to be prepared for it. If we get the IT industry here and our youth are not computer literate, the jobs will go to outsiders’’.
So the project earmarked four computers for each government school in all districts of Uttaranchal. Till date, 1,206 government schools and 281 aided schools have been covered. But 226 schools are yet to be brought into the network.
Training teachers was a big issue. A private-public initiative sought to tackle it. The state government has functional MoUs with Intel, IBM, Microsoft, HP and Cisco. For instance, Microsoft’s training centre at Dehradun is part of its worldwide ‘‘Partners in Education’’ programme. It provides a basic 15-day course to 40 teachers at a time.
J.P. Dobhal teaches maths and science at the Sardar Singh Rawat Inter College in Nainbagh, Tehri. He says teaching his subjects with the aid of computers has made his pupils ‘‘more attentive’’. He has also cut administrative paperwork and created an online record of the 3,000 students who have graduated since the school’s establishment in 1972.
But on the ground the problems are almost as overwhelming as the project’s aims are lofty. Admits Brij Mohan, who teaches social studies at a school in Nagarjun, Almora district: ‘‘The computers are good to use in teaching children, as an interactive tool’’.
Beyond that he’s sceptical about how much the IT lessons could benefit children in remote areas, young boys and girls who spend their childhood walking long distances, to school or to fetch water. ‘‘Language is another big hurdle,’’ he points out, ‘‘the students don’t know much English. So it’s very difficult to explain to them’’.
But Sinha says it was a conscious though much debated decision to go with English. ‘‘This may even force the students to learn English,’’ he says.
The other stumbling block in the hill districts is power and maintenance. Though the schools have been provided generators, these are expensive to run.
The plight of Danya’s Higher Secondary School for Girls, where Sabiha Tabassum teaches, is even curiouser. The PCs arrived a year ago but since the school does not have any closed rooms, they are still sealed, languishing in a nearby college. But Sinha says these are teething troubles.
The other project launched in the state is Shikhar, which aims to give professional IT training. In partnership with Aptech, about 9,800 students have enrolled for an MCA. The first batch to graduate will be in October 2006. And that, hopes Sinha, will be just the beginning.
