Good Intentions, Wrong Notions

It sounds like one of the strips straight from Ripley’s Believe it or Not. Despite being touted as the IT

superpower and the largest global supplier of highly-skilled, English speaking software professionals, barely 5% of India’s 1,00,000 secondary schools have computers and though Internet use in India has increased dramatically in recent years, very few public schools currently have access to it. This is part of the report that was recently released by the World Economic Forum’s Steering Committee on Education under its Global Digital Divide initiative for 2002. Interestingly, the report suggests that despite a student population of over 175 million, the implementation of technology in Indian schools has been a slow process mainly favoring urban areas.

The report might come as a shock for many in the developed world, but the fact that no country has a wider digital divide than India is hardly surprising. Even as India has been celebrating the success of its IT industry and professionals in the global market, there has been a recognition that access to IT for some sections of the population is still severely restricted. The good news is that with global attention now being focused on the digital divide there may be greater effort at reducing the gap. The NGO, World Links, and Intel, who did the study, have in fact launched a pilot project to provide computers to Indian schools and to train teachers. Intel and World Links have also proposed to implement three pilot initiatives to introduce computers, computer literacy skills and teacher professional development training in disadvantaged, lower-middle class secondary schools throughout India.

Under its first pilot plan, World Links and Intel plan to equip 1,000 Indian secondary schools with computers. The second initiative intends to train 5,000 teachers in basic computer literacy from the schools selected for the first pilot plan. The initiative is expected to trigger off a chain reaction with the directly trained 5,000 teachers in turn training two teachers each from their respective schools. The third initiative aims at providing professional development training to 5,600 Indian secondary school teachers, including teachers from the first and second pilot plans. The two firms propose to train the teachers using World Links’ training methodology in the integration of technology in the classroom, in addition to Intel’s Teach to the Future Program. World Links will also provide monitoring and evaluation services to assess the educational and economic impact of the program.

According to the report, while the Internet became increasingly popular during the year 2000, there were only 4.5 million Internet users and 43 Internet service providers (ISPs) in India. While this number has grown in recent years and the WEF expects the figures to escalate with time, it nevertheless says that the old telecommunications infrastructure connecting populated areas combined with high telephone connectivity costs have stunted the growth of Internet in India. On its part, the WEF aims to enable at least 2,00,000 disadvantaged Indian students to develop the knowledge and skills they need to be part of the global knowledge economy through these initiatives. 

Experts, however, suggest the problem is not one of technology alone. In a country where, at last count, nearly 35% of the population is still illiterate, children must first be brought to school before they can benefit from access to computers. Also, the issue of ensuring that children enroll in schools and don’t drop out raises a number of issues that lie beyond the infotech realm.

Focusing on this larger picture is important not just for reasons of equity. The sustained rapid growth of the Indian IT industry depends not only on the development of educational institutions to train potential IT professionals. These institutions must also be assured of a steady stream of qualified, high quality aspirants for seats. As the number of these seats increases there is a need for an even more rapid expansion in the number of aspirants for these seats. Without such an increase in the demand for their seats, these institutions will have to make do with students who are not quite the best. This, in turn, will affect the quality of the IT professionals they produce. And the required growth in the number of high caliber students will not be possible if a large section of the population remains outside the educational mainstream. The sustained growth of the industry will only happen if the digital divide, as well as the larger divide in education, is addressed. 

Shubhendu Parth In New Delhi