The Guiding Light

The Student Knowledge Fora and Jawahar Knowledge Center project
is an initiative of the Andhra Pradesh government, aimed at improving the
quality of human resource with industry grade skills.

The idea behind the project was to bring the best people with
the best infrastructure, guidance, content and opportunities to apply their
knowledge. With this intention, Student Knowledge Fora (SKF) has been initiated
in various colleges and Jawahar Knowledge Centers (JKC) have been promoted so
that there is at least one center in each district of the state.

Students who receive training through JKCs also propagate their
skills and know-how to several more students, thereby making this a powerful
propagator of skills. Jawahar Knowledge Centres offer the opportunity to
students to experiment and share their experiences with their peers outside the
confines of the classroom. "While students hope to add value to their
future, the center aims at adding future to its value," according to Prof.
C Subha Rao, former chairman, Andhra Pradesh State Council of Higher Education.

The
project was initiated with the objective of promoting
industry-institute-government interaction and simultaneously, offering
opportunities to students, getting government projects done in a cost-effective
manner, and producing quality workforce for the industry. The other objectives
were to educate, to undertake research, to provide service to the community, to
reduce gender inequality by training women, to provide conducive environment for
learning, and to produce readily employable graduates by imparting industry
grade skills.

So Much on Offer

The primary service of the project is that of capacity building, through
skill development, in thousands of people and students. The kind of applications
and systems such people are developing vary from information processing to
online transaction processing to sophisticated dash-boards with drill-down
capability to important functionaries such as district collectors. Some of the
applications involve good user interfaces based on flash, speech and videos. So
far, 70 computer applications covering a number of departments in the government
have been developed.

Several programs were conceived through this project. Some of
which are:

Female Student Campus Placement Mission (FSCPM): This
program is being offered for women empowerment and redressal of inequality in IT
as a profession. Over 1,074 students are participating in this endeavor to
produce high-end IT professionals. One has to contrast this with the total
number of women graduates coming out of all IITs, IIITs put-together. This
aspect alone makes this program significant.

Government Services Online using JKCs: The Andhra Pradesh
government initiated a major program called RAJiv (Rajiv Internet Village).
Through this program, various government services have to be made available
online to the citizens. It requires the development and maintenance of
departmental e-governance applications with local know-how and handholding the
government staff. Systems study of several departments will be taken up. Over
200 applications were identified. Detailed specifications are being prepared.
Their development, deployment and replication in other districts are all
planned.

Teacher Training: With the support from the various
universities and Andhra Pradesh State Council of Higher Education (APSCHE), a
massive teacher-training program is planned. Through this, as many as 10,000
teachers are expected to be trained using the resources of JKCs.

Capacity Building and Training of Government Employees: The
state government has been actively promoting the cause of computer literacy for
all its employees. A major program is underway, whereby about 4000 government
employees are being trained in computer skills using JKCs.

Animation Studios: Computer animation industry was
identified as one of the potential areas for employment opportunities to a large
number of people.

Fruits of Success

The project is well on track and has been achieving its objectives. Over 40
companies and 32 academic institutes (engineering colleges), and three
government agencies are partners to this program. There is demand from more
companies and colleges to join the program. Over 5,000 students have been well
trained (all in open sources technologies) and more than 1,000 can readily get
into any developmental environment and start producing results without much
training.

About 1,066 top-notch women engineers are coming out of the
colleges with experience of having developed live e-governance projects. Due to
the residential and intensive type of training given, with the help of training
management software and mentors, usually students learn even in a week what they
might have taken several months. Extensive statistics, student-wise,
subject-wise have been collected as part of student's profile. The gap from
pre-training to a post-training assessment is wide as witnessed in the case of
thousands of students. Due to the limited resources, the service was only
offered in 32 colleges till March 2005 to only female students. Plans are
underway, to expand the number of centers and make it available to more
students.

The context of JKC as a nodal center or an activity center
offering a variety of programs is being appreciated by several entities.
Increasingly various entities/people acknowledge the network of JKCs as an
effective distribution mechanism of knowledge and skills. To extend the reach of
the training program, vast content has been developed in Telugu which was
offered to over 500 rural women. Efforts are underway to digitize and make
several flash based presentations to further expand the reach.

The service parameter of the various engineering colleges of the
state has improved to a great extent.

Viability and Sustainability

The dedicated infrastructure (computers and connectivity) provided to each
student costs around Rs 30,000 per student per year. The cost of mentoring is
about Rs 30,000 per student. The cost of quality content for all subjects and
skills is about Rs 10,000 per student. Each student is expected to be placed
with one of the industrial partners. Upon placement, the student is expected to
pay the equivalent of 2-month salary. Through the 2-month salary upon placement,
and the remuneration for the projects developed, the money generated is expected
to fund the training program to the tune of 60% of the cost. The rest is
expected to be filled in through various contributions from funding agencies
like UGC (content development, further training), the government (cost-effective
solutions, promotion), and potential donors.

Replicability

This project is readily replicable to other regions and in other
colleges/institutions. Several other state governments have already requested
for the information and also delegations have been sent from some of the
developing countries to examine the model followed. For the coming year, it is
being extended to other branches of engineering and other disciplines.

GP Sahu and Dr MP Gupta Department of Management Studies, IIT-Delhi
mail@dqindia.com

Technologies Used