Skip to main content

When Education Reaches Rural Hinterland

India's villages have been struggling with lack of proper schools and infrastructure, high school drop out rate and lack of good teaching faculty. With digital learning platforms reaching out to the underserved rural markets during the lockdown period, there is hope of solving one of country's biggest problems- that of illiteracy 


By Namrata Kohli 


For the first time, India has more rural net users than urban. The latest report by Internet & Mobile Association of India (IA-MAI) and Nielsen shows rural India has 227 million active internet users, ten percent more than urban India’s 205 million. The numbers have been boosted by the cheapest internet connections in the world. In addition, there are 71 million kids, aged 5-11 years who go online using devices of family members. This is pathbreaking as school children are warming up to E-learning models like nobody else. A combination of factors such as greater penetration of smart phones, better telecom infrastructure and coming up of Digi Learning platforms during lockdown period, have been driving a wave of change in rural India.   

Distances are bridged by digital education not just in villages but also within cities. In the pre-Covid times, how would anyone  choose school, coaching center, extra ability classes, activity and hobby centres- courses for personal enhancement or academic learning. Apart from affordability, it was driven by one dynamic only – distance. The ball game changes now with online learning. Take the case of 15 year old Ajay Sharma, an engineering aspirant who had enrolled for the Vidya Mandir Classes at the Dwarka branch, in vicinity of his residence- “The best faculty is inarguably the Punjabi Bagh and Pitampura ones, but it was not practical for me to go there. So I enrolled for the Dwarka class. But during lockdown, as everything is online, we have the best teachers from those branches, streaming live classes. Its actually better than ever before.”

In terms of reach, online education is invincible. Edtech major upGrad has now doubled its classes and courses capacity to deal with the surge in demand for online learning. The company has moved their start dates for all their 40 courses to start every month instead of quarterly, to take on the surge in demand. This has more than doubled their course capacity, and each class now has a peak of 1000 learners at a given time.
“The larger the class in online, the more active the peer-to-peer learning and so it’s the inverse of offline learning,” says Ronnie Screwvala, Co-founder and Executive Chairman, upGrad. "Last month we reached 5, 00,000 learners for our online programs, which is no mean feat in itself. Yet, we are only at the very start of addressing a market with huge potential."

My Take: For a society grappling with the problem of illiteracy online classes come as a boon. The benefits of this are only beginning to come. 

Part of the reason why people were dropping out of schools at the grassroot level, was lack of interest and poor quality of teaching. As penetration of smart phones increases, and telecom infrastructure becomes robust, the number of users in rural India is also set to grow exponentially. Online learning, at least, opens vistas where none existed. Earlier if your gateway to success was legacy and lineage, now its merit, education and self learning. Remote learning has given the remote in the hands of people and you can script your life story the way you want to. In a country where a chaiwallah can become the Prime Minister, there could be more remarkable stories of success of merit meeting opportunity. Digital Education can become the passport to success as it unleashes opportunities to masses instead of a privileged few.
 
 
 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Telemedicine to the aid of home-bound patients in the time of Covid-19

Telemedicine in covid-19 times: You can get to the doctor almost anytime, anywhere, be it on your screen, via voice or plain text for a lower price than in-person consult Namrata Kohli   |   New Delhi Telehealth is bridging the gap between patient and physicians. The physician can now virtually visit the stay-at-home patient and heal from a distance Telemedicine in covid-19 times:  When 37-year-old Priyanka was down with fever and dry cough, she decided to consult a doctor over a WhatsApp call before giving her blood sample for an RT-PCR test. Based on her symptoms, the physician alerted her that it wasn't a mild Covid infection but a moderate one. His diagnosis was confirmed when the test report showed a viral load count of 20. “The massive benefits of telemedicine became evident during the pandemic,” says Priyanka’s doctor, New Delhi-based consultant physician Dr Arvind Kumar. “Everything is about time and if my patients have complications late at ni...
29 comments
Read more

Musings of a Menopausal Woman

   By Namrata Kohli  I was chatting with a gynecologist, and she told me that the most neglected aspect of a woman is her health and how extra careful women ought to be esp during menopause, but they never consult unless a calamity happens. I told her that as a woman in my forties, I plead guilty of the same crime until there is a storm (read health-tsunami of sorts). But I looked at this opportunity to explore more on this intriguing subject plus educate others and myself.  But first what's not menopause. "Don’t confuse heavy bleeding with menopause or 15–20-day cycle ever with menopause," Delhi based gynecologist Dr Sunita Nagpal tells me- "In fact, quite on the contrary, the number of days of the cycle tends to decrease and the gap between the two cycles tends to increase during menopause. But when there is excessive bleeding, there could be certain underlying pathology that needs to be investigated. " So what is menopause exactly? Like our skin ages and has ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Gwalior is in Guinness: Tansen Sangeet Samaroh 2024

  Gwalior is in Guinness: Tansen Sangeet Samaroh 2024 By Namrata Kohli History was created at the centenary celebration of the “Tansen Sangeet Samaroh 2024” at Gwalior where a musical ensemble entered the Guinness Book of World Records. The Tansen music festival was hosted by the UNESCO City of Music, Gwalior in its hundredth edition from 15-19 December 2024, in the backdrop of the historic Gwalior Fort and Tansen Tomb. Guiness had set several stringent criteria for evaluation- a minimum of 300 artists playing at least four instruments, and three songs spanning two minutes each. But the musical ensemble composed by renowned flute player Pandit Ronu Majumdar far surpassed all these criteria. Said Majumdar- “We had 563 artists. I was told by the Indian representative of Guinness that in any international evaluation of legends like Mozart, Beethoven, or   Sangeet samrat   Tansen, we need three songs and each song should be of minimum two minutes duration. So far, I was only ...
Post a Comment
Read more