In India, MNCs try to bridge digital divide

Rising at 5 in the morning, C. Santosh, 14, hurries to the vegetable market in Mustaidpura near Hyderabad, to work as a helper at a vegetable stall, earning Rs 25 per day to support his family, including a mentally challenged father. Four hours later, wrapping up his work, Santosh rushes to the government school. He is, in fact, waiting for the school to open so he can get his turn at the computer.

"We get about 15 minutes of individual computer time, so I don’t want to waste the opportunity, because the computer makes learning so easy and wonderful," says Santosh, who wants to be a CID inspector when he grows up. "The computer is the best thing to have happened to me," he adds. "The computer has been a godsend for teachers as well, because it enables us to explain the subject better to students," says Sunita Yadav of the Mustaidpura school, where Santosh is studying. "Studying biology has become easy because of interactive CDs," says A. Maheshwari, another Class 9 student.

Santosh is among the thousands of children at government schools across the country who are making use of the computer literacy programmes funded by giant transnational companies like Microsoft Corporation and IBM. In an ironical twist, it is the world’s largest technology companies who have taken it upon themselves to help bridge the "digital divide" in India. Microsoft Corp, the world’s largest software maker, has signed MoUs with nine governments around the country, and has committed $20 million to promote computer literacy among disadvantaged kids in rural areas. Says Mr Amit Newatia, academic programme manager for Microsoft’s Project Siksha in India, "It is an effort by Microsoft to bridge the digital divide between urban school kids and their rural counterparts."

Adds Krishna Chandramouli, Special Project Director of the Sarvashiksha Abhiyan in Andhra Pradesh, "The teacher training programme managed by Microsoft IT Academy in Hyderabad has resulted in an enormous advantage to both them and the students. MIDA has so far trained 2,800 teachers. The immediate impact has been that the dropout rate in government schools offering computer-aided education has fallen."

"The programme, developed by Microsoft IT Academy has so far trained 50,000 government school teachers in nine states, the schools under the Municipal Corporation of Delhi and Navodaya Vidyalaya Samiti schools," says Mr Newatia."The programme runs for 12 days, during which the teachers nominated by the government, are intensively trained in the Windows operating system, including Word, PowerPoint and Excel," says A. Gayatri, a faculty member of the academy.

According to Mr Kishore Balaji, programme manager for Project Shiksha at Microsoft, Microsoft had three programmes under its Partners in Learning initiative. These include the "Fresh Start" programme, which is geared to promote increased technology access for students through wider deployment of donated PCs. "Microsoft provides primary and secondary schools with a licensed copy of Windows 98 or Windows 2000 at $2.5 per PC per year, under an agreement with the schools," says Mr Newatia.

"The model is that while Microsoft will provide the training, the involvement of the state government is essential to make the programme a success," he adds. "The teachers who are trained have to submit a project within three months to get a training completion certificate." IBM runs the KidSmart programme for underprivileged children in five states. "The KidSmart is not a computer literacy programme, but is aimed at making learning fun through computers," said Jalaja Pillai, manager, corporate community relations, at IBM India, on Thursday.

Under the IBM KidSmart programme, IBM runs 1,230 Young Explorer Units in the states-Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Pondicherry and Maharashtra. The units have a computer donated by IBM, software and a printer. "We plan to expand the number of YEUs this year," she says.

Asked what drove MNC technology companies to invest in computer literacy programmes in rural India, Mr Newatia said, "The idea is to help bridge the digital divide, and provide access to digital technology to the underprivileged children, who have no such access now. This will help them in being better equipped to compete in a globalising economy when they grow." "As far as we are concerned, the computer literacy programme funded by Microsoft is helping us in reducing the dropout rate by providing quality training to government teachers. More importantly, the digital divide between urban and rural school kids is getting bridged," concludes Mr Chandramouli of the Sarvashiksha Abhiyan.