Education News

Delhi Model partnership Like the IITs (Indian Institutes of Technology) and IIMs (Indian Institutes of Management) and the 952 Kendriya Vidyalaya schools countrywide, it’s one of the few government initiatives in education that has clicked. Conceptualised and promoted by the late prime minister Rajiv Gandhi (1944-1991) in 1985 to provide the brightest and best rural children the equivalent of top-grade public (i.e. private, exclusive) secondary school education, the number of India’s showpiece 573 CBSE-affiliated Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalayas (JNVs) with an aggregate enrollment of 158,000 class VI-XII children and 11,000 teachers is set to double during the Eleventh Plan period (2007-12). “The JNV experiment has proved so successful that we would like to promote another 500 schools in rural India during the next five years,” A.K. Rath, the newly appointed secretary of the department of school education and literacy of the Union ministry of human resource development told this correspondent while giving away Intel’s ‘Best Integration of Technology in Education Awards 2007’ to students, teachers and schools of the Navodaya Vidyalaya Samiti (which manages the JNVs) in New Delhi on February 18. Speaking on the occasion, Rath also outlined the Centre’s ambitious plans to scale up the country’s secondary school infrastructure to accommodate the large number of children who are readying to enter secondary education following the implementation of the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan programme which makes it mandatory for the State (Central and state governments) to provide compulsory education to all children in the six-14 age group. According to Rath, a secondary school will be made available within a radius of 7 km across India by 2012. Although JNVs which provide free-of-charge co-ed secondary education to carefully selected rural children have established a reputation for all-round excellence, perhaps their most notable achievement has been to integrate ICT (information communication techno-logies) into classroom education. Working with several blue chip IT companies including Intel, Microsoft, Wipro etc, JNV schools are perhaps more IT savvy than most top-rank private schools (the computer-student ratio has reached 1:12 across its schools and 95 percent of JNV teachers are computer literate). “The introduction in 1999 of the annual Integration of Technology in Education Awards by Intel Education specifically for JNVs was an excellent idea. It has motivated students and teachers to become computer literate and integrate ICT in teaching-learning,” says H.N.S. Rao, former deputy commissioner of the Navodaya Vidyalaya Samiti and the driver of this Intel-JNV initiative. Likewise O. N. Singh, commissioner of the Navodaya Vidyalaya Samiti, acknowledges that the IT industry and Intel Education in particular, have played a major role in the miraculous transformation of rural JNVs into the country’s most ICT-savvy secondaries. “Intel and several other IT companies have played a major role in making our schools IT literate, developing our curriculum and training our 10,000-plus teachers and non-teaching staff,” says Singh. Buoyed by the success of this public-private partnership, JNVs are becoming actively involved with government and private schools in their neighbourhoods to pass on their ICT in education experience to the latter. This…