The Hindu Business Line : Beaming down learning for all

At the Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham Coimbatore campus, an e-revolution of sorts is brewing, with the University playing a key role in transforming select village clusters in the vicinity into knowledge societies by applying technology.Within the campus, the e-classroom is ergonomically designed to enhance the teaching and learning process and give teachers and students the feel of a normal classroom session. Amrita has extended the knowledge and electronic connectivity to village clusters through Village Resource Centres (VRC), wherein education, training and skills are imparted to bring the rural populace into the mainstream of action.

Amrita is working with EDUSAT programme and providing video conferencing based tele-education.

Cisco is a partner in the AMRITA-ISRO VRC Network initiative and is establishing the basic network (which is the foundation of the project) that will connect the control and command centre to all of the VRCs across India and drive all the applications on it.

Besides setting up the command and control centre at Amrita, Cisco is setting up networks in the nine VRCs in Kerala and Andaman and Nicobar Islands.

The command centre will connect to the nine centres (for now) and deliver the various services (tele-education, tele-medicine and other information for agriculture and fishing) planned as a part of the project.

"We strongly believe that networking communication is an equaliser. We have leveraged networking technology to reach out to the remotest part of the country,' says Rana of Cisco.

Cisco is looking for partners to deliver the solution by providing the network infrastructure.

According to Rana, the connectivity into the village was via the satellite and Indian Space Research Organisation.

ISRO is tying up with NGOs to set up VRCs across the country and providing satellite connectivity for connecting the VRC networks to the Control and Command Centre.

The VRCs are expected to deliver a broad spectrum of service (via satellite network) such as tele-education — by using the best available teachers to deliver quality education to a large number of rural schools, impart skill-based training in tune with local needs of the rural population; tele-medicine - by delivering basic and specialised healthcare, preventive and diagnostic services digitally at every rural doorstep; tele-agriculture, tele-fisheries, etc.

India has approximately 2.3 lakh village panchayats.

The Vice-Chancellor of Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, P. Venkat Rangan, says projects such as these will go a long way in spreading the revolution of quality education that is feasible and within everyone's reach.

"Along with education, we can use this connectivity backbone to roll out other socio-developmental measures."

Picture by Mohammed Yousuf

lnr@thehindu.co.in