Microsoft’s deepening engagement with Indian education

Against the dismal backdrop of stasis in Indian education, the widening and deepening involvement of Microsoft Corporation — the world’s most valuable corporate enterprise — with Indian K-12 and higher education sectors, comes as a ray of sunshine piercing the gloom. Dilip Thakore reports For India’s moribund education sector, within which over 250 million children and youth and an estimated 6.8 million teachers and academics struggle to extract some real learning from obsolete syllabuses and pedagogies, this has been yet another winter of discontent. Stuck in the formulation and legislative pipeline for seven years before it was enacted last year, the Right to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009 has proved to be excessively focused on dumping the obligation of the Central and state governments upon the country’s 175,885 independent schools, rather than upgrading their own 1.09 million government schools, and is embroiled in a welter of litigation in the Supreme Court. Moreover five legislative initiatives of great pith and moment which have the potential to sharply upgrade Indian education viz, the Foreign Educational Institutions (Regulation of Entry and Operations) Bill, 2009; the Education Tribunals Bill, 2010; National Council for Higher Education and Research Bill, 2009 and the Medical Council Amendment Bill, 2010 are in limbo with the winter session of Parliament rendered dysfunctional by the row over the 2-G telecom spectrum allocation scandal. And with the forthcoming budget session of Parliament likely to be preoccupied with fiscal issues (if Parliament is allowed to function), it’s a moot point when these pending Bills will be enacted. Against this dismal backdrop of stasis in Indian education, the widening and deepening involvement of Microsoft Corporation (India) Pvt. Ltd — a wholly-owned subsidiary of the US-based Microsoft Inc, the globally famous IT software and technology behemoth and world’s most valuable corporate enterprise (market capitalization: $240 billion or Rs.1080,000 crore) — with Indian K-12 and higher education sectors, comes as a ray of sunshine piercing the gloom. On December 13, MS India signaled its intent to actively engage with Indian academia by starring in a first-ever next generation cloud computing symposium in IIT-Madras which attracted the enthusiastic participation of over 50 of the country’s best technology leaders and academics. And later this month (January) the company is scheduled to flag off its Dream Spark Yatra (journey) under which teams from its Digital Literacy Curriculum division will tour 100 cities over three months, staging one-day symposia to acquaint over 60,000 higher secondary and college students with latest Microsoft technologies and designer tools. “Ever since Microsoft Corporation set up operations in India in 1990, we have always regarded education as a high priority area. We believe that technology offers new educational possibilities that can help empower students and teachers. Therefore under our Unlimited Potential initiative launched in 2007, Microsoft India is focused on making long-term investments to facilitate relevant, affordable access to techno-logy in areas which are aligned with India’s priorities — education being one of them. The huge investment made in education over the years has propelled India into…