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Ambar Singh Roy

Orissa's e-Shishu project seeks to ensure education for all children up to age 14 in the State.

Orissa's e-Shishu project — on how a State Government and its district administration can leverage ICT (information and communication technology) to deliver governance — is a model worth emulating.

The project has demonstrated the initiative in capacity building of nearly 50,000 officers and staff of the Government.

The core philosophy behind e-Shishu was to overcome the hurdles in the way of ensuring Universal Elementary Education for all children in the State up to age 14. The idea was also to ensure that funds allocated for school infrastructure and children's education were properly channelised and that there was no mismatch between resources that were required and their proper utilisation.

The project's focus was on tackling the problems by connecting the three vertices of the education triangle i.e. children, schools and teachers. A live database of all children in the State up to the age of 14 incorporating 26 different parameters was created, and is still continuing. The initiative provided for a technology framework in e-governance wherein it is possible to prioritise resource allocation, track child progress and achievement and make teachers accountable. Progress can now be monitored better and dropouts minimised. Since the data collected is on the Web, the transparency of the system is ensured and citizens are free to offer their suggestions.

The process involved tagging 52,000 villages to the schools, EMIS (Education Management Information System) code generation and Intelligent Character Recognition/Non-Intelligent Character Recognition sheet designing for data collection.

An authentic database of 10.8 million children was generated using Intelligent Character Recognition technology. The objective was to map each of the 70,000 schools in the State and identify 1,40,000 teachers. Two sub-projects under e-Shishu have been initiated. While the Orissa GIS School Mapping aims to map the available infrastructure in each school in the State, the Educational Personnel Information System will help gather information on teachers and teacher-to-pupil ratio in the State.

e-Shishu was conceived by the Orissa Primary Education Programme Authority. It has been implemented jointly by the IT department of the State Government, the Orissa Computer Application Centre, Software Technology Parks of India and CSM Technologies. e-Shishu fetched the Orissa Government the 5th India Tech Excellence Award. Other States that vied for the award included Gujarat, West Bengal, Delhi and Punjab.

The award was judged on various parameters, such as the criticality of IT usage, improvement in service, impact on quality and productivity, impact on society and innovation in terms of reach and replicability.

ambar_ singhroy@rediffmail.com

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