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Raje Govt. signs MoUs under education initiative

Special Correspondent

Move to improve quality of life and education in the State

JAIPUR: The Rajasthan Government has signed seven more MoUs with various organisations under the Rajasthan Education Initiative (REI) to improve the quality of life and education in the State. With this, the number of total MoUs signed by the State after the meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2005, has gone up to 18.

The new partners of the Government include the Nandi Foundation, which has signed three MOUs, the Confederation of Indian Industry and the Piramal Foundation.

One of the MoUs signed with the Nandi Foundation pertains to imparting of comprehensive health care to 40,000 students in Government and aided schools, EGS centers and madras of Udaipur City. In the first phased of the programme, around 220 schools, primarily located in Udaipur city would be covered with the participation of the Urban Improvement Trust and Municipal council.

The second MoU with the Nandi Foundation deals with providing hot and nutritious evening meal at low cost to the needy poor in the Udaipur city. The Foundation, making use of the infrastructure already created for the mid-day meal scheme, would make available evening meals at pre-determined centres for a fixed duration to those who have no access to food.The third MoU with the Foundation is to provide mid-day meal on every school working day at the time of interval to 20,000 students from schools at a radius of 30 kms of Jhadol tehsil in Udaipur district.

The Piramal Foundation will provide quality teacher training to volunteers who will be then deputed as volunteer teachers in Government schools. The Foundation has offered to recruit participants from various institutions in Rajasthan, initially as a pilot project for selected Government schools in Jhunjhunu and in the neighbouring districts. The MoUs, signed with CII are to evaluate the functioning of some identified schools for initiating measures for improvement of quality education and to identify potential schools to be taken up under the adopt a school programme of CII.

An update meeting of REI in the State capital on Friday and Saturday was told that so far the initiative has brought under its purview 600 odd schools in the State. C. K. Mathew, Principal Secretary, Education, informed about imparting training to 1495 teachers under the initiative besides providing e-Content to 187 schools. In a couple of months e-Content would be extended to a total of 1000 schools, he said.

Government officials and delegates from various multilateral organizations such as UNICEF, UNDP, World Bank, WEF, Microsoft, CISCO, Asim Premji Foundation, Bodh, American Indian Foundation, Akshay Patra and Rubicon attended the update meeting.

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