The Hindu : 'National e-learning project ready for take-off'

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Feb 12, 2003

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National

'National e-learning project ready for take-off'

By Anand Parthasarathy

Mumbai Feb. 11. The e-learning pilot project undertaken last year by the Central Government in 20 schools spread across seven districts, is now ready to be launched nationally and will encompass 60,000 schools during the Tenth Plan period, says Rajeeva Ratna Shah, Secretary, Union Department of Information Technology.

These schools will be provided very small aperture (VSAT) satellite terminals as well as wireless connectivity, which will link to at least 10 computers per school. Content creation in multiple school subjects has already been taken up and the entire curriculum would be e-nabled, not just computers as a subject, he added. He was delivering the inaugural speech at the National Association of Software and Service Companies' NASSCOM 2003 conference, which opened here today.

The Indian Government had set a target of Rs. 12,000 crores spending over the next four years in e-governance projects — but this was not something it could address alone, he said. With industry help, it was hoped to put in place a national Indian portal; State level; citizens' services portals as well as an e-business interface between all Indian suppliers and their government customers. ``Our one billion population is our digital opportunity,'' he added, mentioning the edge that the recently commissioned indigenous 1- teraflop supercomputer `Param Padma' would provide in leveraging our strengths in bioinformatics and nanotechnology.

In his opening remarks, NASSCOM Chairman, Arun Kumar, stated that in a difficult year for the global IT business in 2002, the Indian industry had nevertheless notched up a 29 per cent growth rate, to cross a $ 10 billion revenue landmark. The Association had set itself a target for the Indian Infocomm industry to notch up $ 77 billion by 2008, he added.

Calling himself ``NASSCOM's biggest fan'', the British Minister for Small Business, Nigel Griffiths, said his country had seen 350 Indian-owned companies set up shop in the last five years — 150 of them in the last 18 months. He leads the biggest foreign team to the NASSCOM event, which also sees 60 international speakers and national teams from the U.S., Canada, Malaysia, Germany and Singapore. The meet ends on Friday

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