India has widest digital divide: WEF By Ela Dutt, Indo-Asian News Service
New York, Jan 31 (IANS) While no country has benefited more than India from the IT revolution, no country has a wider digital divide, says a country report released by the World Economic Forum (WEF) Thursday. The report was released by the WEF's Steering Committee on Education, a part of the Global Digital Divide Initiative for 2002. The forum began its five-day annual meeting in New York City Thursday. Intel, the world's leading chipmaker, and the non-governmental organisation World Links, who jointly did the study, said they were launching three pilot projects that seek to introduce computers into thousands of Indian schools and train several teachers. Barely five percent of India's 100,000 secondary schools have computers and, although Internet use in India has increased dramatically in recent years, very few public schools currently have access to computers. "With a student population of over 175 million, the implementation of technology in Indian schools has been a slow process," mainly favouring urban areas, points out the report. The two organisations proposed the implementation of three pilot initiatives to introduce computers, computer literacy skills, and teacher professional development training in disadvantaged, lower-middle class secondary schools throughout India. In Pilot Initiative 1, World Links and Intel plan to equip 1,000 Indian secondary schools with computers, and will look to WEF members and others to assist with acquiring new and used hardware and software. School locations will be determined according to the needs of currently serviced states, school demand and the interests of WEF members. The second initiative intends to train 5,000 teachers from the 1,000 newly connected (Pilot 1) schools in basic computer literacy. It is expected that the directly trained 5,000 teachers will, in turn, train 2 teachers each in their schools. Pilot Initiative 3 will involve the provision of professional development training to 5,600 Indian secondary school teachers, including teachers from Pilots 1 and 2. The two firms propose to train the teachers using World Links' training methodology in the integration of technology in the classroom, in addition to Intel's Teach to the Future Programme. World Links will provide monitoring and evaluation services to assess the educational and economic impact of the programme. According to the report, while the Internet is becoming increasingly popular, in 2000, there were only 4.5 million Internet users and 43 Internet service providers (ISPs) in India. This number has grown in recent years, and is expected to escalate with time. "Nevertheless, an old telecommunications infrastructure connecting populated areas, combined with high phone line connection costs, has stunted the growth of the Internet in India," the authors said. The Indian ministry of information technology has recently announced a $2 billion investment to improve Internet connectivity in 100,000 schools nationwide. The ministry of human resource development has introduced a "Smart School" programme in which students in 1,000 schools will be encouraged to use technology. A number of WEF Digital Divide Task Force members have implemented Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) projects in India. Several local grassroots initiatives by NGOs have furthered the spread of technology into rural India, the report recognises. And the Indian private sector has also become involved. Outlining a number of incentives to attract more participation, the Steering Committee says involvement in projects in India will bring with it perks like public relations boost through association with the WEF, participation in WEF events and press coverage. "Such showcasing opportunities should prove to enhance the partner's overall recognition amongst its customers and peers, thereby assisting in the future launch of any new services," says the report. "Our goal is to enable at least 200,000 disadvantaged Indian students to develop the knowledge and skills they need to be part of the global knowledge economy," the project coordinators said. --Indo-Asian News Service ------------ ***GKD is an initiative of the Global Knowledge Partnership*** To post a message, send it to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To subscribe or unsubscribe, send a message to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. In the 1st line of the message type: subscribe gkd OR type: unsubscribe gkd Archives of previous GKD messages can be found at: <http://www.globalknowledge.org>
