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 the global knowledge economy. Therefore it’s critical that the country and industry continue to focus on education,” says Ravi Venkatesan, an alumnus of IIT-Bombay, Purdue University (USA) and the Harvard Business School, who began his professional career in Cummins Inc, USA in 1987, and was appointed chairman and chief executive of MS India in 2004.

It’s hardly surprising that monitors and mavens of India’s education scene are enthused by this global IT industry heavyweight’s expanding engagement with formal and informal education in India. Because since the parent Microsoft Corporation was promoted by software wizards Paul Allen and Bill Gates in Seattle, USA in 1975, the company has matured into a global market leader in software development and technology innovations. With its branded software and flagship products and services  including Microsoft Office, Windows, Power Point and Internet Explorer, the Redmond, Washington (USA)-based software pioneer which employs 88,000 carefully-chosen IT and business professionals worldwide, has earned an awesome reputation for product development, project implementation and breakthrough technology innovation.

To the extent that currently Microsoft Corp is the world’s most valuable and admired business enterprise and Bill Gates (who stepped down as chairman and chief executive in 2008 to work full-time with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation), is the world’s wealthiest individual with a net worth (calculated mainly on the market value of his shareholding in the company) estimated by the authoritative Forbes magazine at $54 billion (Rs.243,000 crore) in 2009.

Within some prescient circles in Indian academia there is great expectation and growing excitement that Indian education will be doubly benefited with Microsoft’s involvement. Not only because of this transnational corporation’s awesome innovation, problem-solving and project implementation capabilities, but also because the company has acquired an excellent reputation for discharging its wider corporate social responsibilities within host societies and communities around the world in which it has planted the company flag. Moreover the company is also intimately — even if not formally — connected with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) which has a massive corpus of $36 billion (Rs.162,000 crore), funded by the endowment of equity shares made to the foundation by Gates and his wife Melinda — the largest shareholders of this bluest blue-chip company. Over the past 11 years since BMGF was registered, it has transformed into the world’s largest philanthropic organisation committed to the eradication of poverty, hunger and illiteracy around the world.

With a global business corporation with superb organisational capability for efficient resource mobilisation and management, combined with exemplary commitment to corporate social responsibility preparing to seriously engage with Indian education across the board, the fallout has to be socially beneficial. Particularly since Microsoft India is hardly a debutante in India’s wide open K-12 and higher education spaces. For over a decade following the CSR and philanthropic impulses of the parent company, the Indian subsidiary has been quietly and unpretentiously making a concerted organisational effort to introduce contemporary information communication technologies (ICTs) and pedagogies to the country’s lackadaisical academic communities.

According to Irina Ghose, an alumna of IIT-BHU and XLRI Jamshedpur who  worked with HCL and Wipro prior to signing with MS India in 2009, and is currently the Bangalore-based director of the ten-strong public sector education division of Microsoft India, under its transforming education, fostering local innovation, and enabling jobs and opportunities initiatives, MS India has made a significant impact upon Indian education. “Under our Project Shiksha launched in 2003, the company has made 512,000 government K-12 school teachers IT literate by training them in ICT, internet and security usage and day-to-day curriculum delivery. More-over early last year we operationalised Windows MultiPoint — an innovation of MS India’s research division — in Andhra Pradesh. Windows MultiPoint enables several students to share one personal computer using multiple mice, thus reducing the cost of an ICT lab by 25 percent and power consumption by 70 percent. And more recently under our cloud space Microsoft Live@edu program we have offered free-of-charge communication and collaboration services to education institutions enabling interaction between their alumni, faculty and student communities,” says Ghose.

Surprisingly, the MS India management has been modest about proclaiming Project Shiksha. Viewed from the perspective that the total population of government school teachers is 5 million, the company has rendered primary and secondary education great service by providing ICT training to 10 percent of the country’s government school teachers, who in turn are teaching 25 million students. Moreover it’s pertinent to note that unlike several corporates which provide cursory ICT training to rustic teachers often inducing IT phobia within the community, MS India puts all its teacher trainees through a 12-day residential training programme covering IT literacy, internet and ICT usage to enable them to deliver their daily classroom curriculum more efficiently. “Our prime objective is that the training should give teachers sufficient confidence to use ICT in their classrooms on a sustained basis. To this end we are set to roll out a Project Shiksha impact assessment study in the near future,” says Ghose.

Beyond the K-12 segment, Microsoft India is also delivering valuable new technology familiarisation and training services in higher education. Driven by a spirit of enlightened self-interest, the company’s 80-strong Developer and Platform Evangelism team is active within 7,500 colleges and universities countrywide, training students, faculty and institutional managements to use MS software, technology and products. “We believe that if students and faculty in higher education are familiarised with and trained to use the world’s best software and technology, there will be a great increase in institutional learning and productivity, and students will be industry-ready upon graduation. Therefore this division has initiated several projects such as Biz Spark to equip students with technology to promote businesses; strengthen the STEM (science, technology engineering and maths) curriculums of 4,000 colleges across the country by providing them free-of-charge technology and software to enrich their curriculums, as also free access to curriculum repositories to 55,000 science and technology faculty to contemporise their core curriculums.

“In addition we have initiated several other training and competitive programmes such as Student Partners to develop 750 top students to peer teach in tier II and III cities, and our annual Imagine Technology Cup global competition which attracted 100,000 student entries from India last year,” says Pratima Amonkar, academic director, MS India. An electronics, computer sciences and French post-graduate of London and Bombay universities, Amonkar has acquired wide experience of new information technologies in human resource development, having served with NIIT (1990-2000), IBM India (2000-2005) and Sun Microsystems Learning Services (2007-08) before signing up with MS India in 2009.

Its socially beneficial engagement with school and collegiate segments of the education spectrum apart, as one of the contemporary world’s most innovative research-driven companies (Microsoft Corporation’s global research and development expenditure in 2009 aggregated $8 billion or Rs.36,000 crore), MS India is also actively engaged with India’s high-potential computer sciences research community working in the country’s best universities, IITs and engineering colleges.

“Although India’s engineering colleges graduate 250,000 engineers annually, less than 100 of them sign up to write Ph D dissertations in the computer sciences as against over 1,500 in the US and 2,000 in China. Therefore Microsoft Research India is helping to build a research ecosystem which will attract students into Ph D level computer sciences research. To this end we have innovated several programmes such as Tech Vista under which we invite the world’s top computer sciences researchers to Indian campuses to talk about their work and interact with undergraduate and postgrad students. Concurrently we are running our own Microsoft Research India internship programme under which we take on 120 engineering undergrad students to work with us as interns for 12 weeks every year. Moreover under our Research Experience or RX initiative we work with academic partners such as the IITs and IIITs, helping them induct research interns. We believe that since India’s IT industry is now a major force globally, the country has to move up the value chain. For this, an attractive and enabling research ecosystem is very important,” explains Vidya Natampally, director of strategy at MS Research India.

Stimulating increasingly necessary high-end research by helping build a national research ecosystem apart, the depth of Microsoft Corporation’s commitment to Indian education is indicated by the megacorp’s ready willingness to share its pioneer research output in cloud computing, with Indian academia. On December 13, the company participated in a major symposium on the sprawling 100-acre campus of IIT-Madras where it shared the latest developments of Microsoft’s foray into cloud computing — “the next big thing in IT” — with a 50-strong audience. “Cloud computing permits business and education organisations to access vast libraries of information stored in the ‘clouds’ and surrender or offload it when not required. This new technology enables huge savings in capital expenditure, because owned or leased servers to store and access information are not required. Cloud computing technology offers unprecedented information access to education institutions and we are ready and willing to familiarise students and faculty with our advanced Azure cloud computing technology,” says Rajnish Menon an ERP (enterprise resource planning) and CRM (customer relations management) professional who served with Reliance Energy (1998-2003) and SAP/Oracle (2003-07) prior to joining MS India, where he heads the company’s Azure Evangelism division.

Yet given that India’s inadequate higher education system accommodates a mere 9 percent or 11 million of the country’s youth in the age group 18-24,  the greatest challenge confronting Indian society is to upskill if not educate,  the huge number of the country’s youth and adults forced out of a moribund and indifferent school system by a combin-ation of factors and circumstances including pathetic infrastructure, obsolete curriculums, chronic teacher truancy in K-12 education, and low grade facilities and teaching in the overwhelming majority of the country’s 509 universities and 31,000 colleges. In the informal education segment as well, MS India is actively involved with 12 state governments and the Delhi-based IGNOU (Indira Gandhi National Open University) — the world’s largest distance learning varsity with an aggregate enrolment of 3 million students — to build a vocational education infrastructure for people of all ages who have fallen through the cracks of the education system.

“Essentially in our Microsoft Learning Division we offer higher secondary students, individuals and business enterprises training, assessment and certification services through 35 training partner organisations in 70 certified locations across the country. Our carefully selected training partners deliver the Microsoft global curriculum and content employing the company’s globally tried and tested pedagogies. Together with our training partners the Learning Division trains and certifies 250,000 people per year. Moreover under our Project Jyoti we have established 1,300 Community Technology Learning Centres in partnership with 14 reputed NGOs in rural India. The objective of this initiative is to provide basic IT skills and livelihood opportunities to rural citizens. Under Project Jyoti the company has made grants aggregating Rs.47 crore over the past six years to our partner NGOs, and over 290,000 individuals have been given IT and livelihood skills training certification,” says S. Ganesh, business leader of the Microsoft Learning Division.

But even as the growing community of educators within Microsoft India and knowledgeable educationists within the country’s academic fraternity welcome the beneficial engagement of the global IT and software giant with Indian education, inevitably there are critics who question the company’s motives and intention. “Contrary to its CSR proclamations, the prime motive behind the intensifying involvement of Microsoft — a ruthless, hard-ball business corporation — with education institutions around the world is to perpetuate market domination of its branded software and technologies, and brainwash students and faculty into becoming life-long Microsoft customers. India has the world’s largest child and youth population with huge market potential for the company. Hence its vested interest in Indian education,” says an admittedly leftist professor of IIT-Delhi, opining on condition of anonymity.

Such  reactions to the valuable contribution Microsoft and other multinationals such as Intel (which has provided ICT training to over 1,000,000 school teachers countrywide) have  made to the modernisation of Indian education are not uncommon in Indian academia dominated by business-illiterate Left-leaning academics who  tend to expect completely altruistic conduct from private industry, while remaining silent about the massive acts of commission and omission of the Central and state governments whose mismanagement and interference have ruined the country’s once respected institutions of higher education. “Resentment of successful business enterprises, especially multinationals with a reputation for aggressive marketing, is quite common in Indian academia where even suggestive brand promotion is frowned upon. Yet I don’t believe Microsoft pushes its products aggressively in academic seminars and forums. On the contrary the company is engaging very positively with Indian education, and if as a consequence they derive some business advantage, that’s enlightened capitalism,” says Dr. R. Natarajan, former director of IIT-Madras and former chairman of the Delhi-based All India Council for Technical Education, the apex-level supervisory organisation for all technical institutions of higher education, including 3,500 engineering colleges and 950 B-schools countrywide.

Dr. Ashok Misra former director of IIT-Bombay and currently director of Intellectual Ventures, a Bangalore-based company which collaborates with inventors and pioneer companies to develop and monetise inventions and patent portfolios, agrees. “Microsoft has designed some of the world’s most popular and proven branded software. If it trains people to use its widely installed software technologies to improve business performance and productivity, it is serving the public interest,” says Misra.

Quite obviously the carping of the shrinking minority of ideologically committed academics who tend to be reflexively suspicious of commercial success, doesn’t bother the Microsoft India management which in a characteristically low-profile style, is pro-actively engaged with Indian education. “We will continue to focus on education and skills building. It is an imperative for the country, and therefore by association, for us as a company. In addition to ensuring that our current programmes and initiatives keep achieving greater success, we will continue to explore new ways to deliver technology and services to India’s schools and institutions of higher education. Globally Microsoft will continue to invest in developing innovative products and services, tailoring relevant programs and evolving business models for reaching the benefits of technology as widely as possible,” says Ravi Venkatesan, chairman and chief executive of Microsoft India.

This commitment from the world’s most go-getting IT technologies company should be sweet music to the ears of the small but determined minority of bona-fide educationists, teachers and academics struggling against the system’s delay, the inertia of the country’s educracy, and middle class indifference to public education, to deliver real learning to the world’s largest short-changed and educationally-deprived child and youth population.