Kerala - Thiruvananthapuram   

Rs.121-crore aid sought

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The State has submitted a Rs.121-crore proposal to the 13th Finance Commission for expanding Information and Communication Technology (ICT)-enabled education in the State’s schools.

This is expected to benefit as many as 6,840 schools, including upper primary schools, in the State, Education Minister M.A. Baby said here on Tuesday.

He was participating in a function got up to inaugurate the new office complex of the IT@School programme and the launch of the new Edusat up-link facility at the SCERT complex at Poojappura.

The State had asked the commission for assistance to make the IT@School a national-level Centre for Excellence in ICT-enabled education and for the construction of a new multimedia production complex.

IT@School Executive Director Anvar Sadath told The Hindu that of the Rs.121 crore that the State had sought, Rs.51 crore would be for upgrade of the hardware and software at various facilities; Rs.25 crore for setting up a Centre for Excellence; Rs.30 crore for instituting a ‘content repository’ for IT@School and Edusat programmes. The remaining Rs.15 crore would be for setting up a new multimedia production complex. The new studio is meant to provide a qualitative boost to the programmes of the IT@School and to make the State self-reliant in this age of multimedia educational content.

“We have sought this assistance for the period 2010-2015. For the first year we have sought Rs.53 crore and Rs.17 crore per year for the next four years. We hope that the Finance Commission will accede to our demands,” he said. The IT@School now had a bandwidth of 3.6 Mbps over the Ku band of the Edusat. “This is grossly inadequate. We hope that the ISRO will at least double this bandwidth, but a final decision has not been taken on this,” he added.

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