The Hindu Business Line : C-Dac to develop education portal

Hyderabad March 13 The Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-Dac) is all poised to launch the Indian Development Gateway (InDG), which has a mandate to serve as an integrated portal for education and development objectives.

The Department of Information Technology, Government of India, has mandated the development of this portal to C-Dac, Hyderabad, which operates out of the Jawaharlal Nehru Technology University for this project.

The InDG aims to provide need and demand based information to rural people in local languages in areas of health, water and sanitation, primary education, agriculture, rural energy, while offering some of the e-governance services.

As a part of the portal and gateway development, C-Dac is hosting a series of events educating potential users and aggregating content that would be useful to end users on areas such as education, agriculture and related financial options and healthcare.

Regional languages

According to Director of C-Dac Hyderabad, Mr Sharat Chandra Babu, the portal would be launched in English, Telugu, Tamil and Hindi to be followed up with other languages. The objective is to provide information and services that are region and country specific.

As a part of its education initiative, it is proposed to connect primary schools and village information centres and involve other stakeholders such as non-government organisations and later integrate it with the Sarva Siksha Abhiyan project.

Content matters

As a part of the InDG project, the effort is on to identify the existing content readily available in the open source domain or in league with various State governments, and thereafter, refine the content to suit the general requirements and also translate the relevant content for various regions of the country.

The programme manager at InDG, Mr N. Srinivasa Rao, told Business Line that the portal, to be launched next month, apart from serving the development goals aims to provide information and education content for school children. Delivered through multimedia presentations, apart from imparting necessary training, it would also seek to create online forums.

Through the Sarva Siksha Abhiyan it is proposed to reach out to over 1,000 schools that have been computerised.