The Hindu Business Line : Canopy for village schools

If a project envisaged by the Motorola Foundation were to take wings, then soon you could see a virtual classroom in progress at several village schools.

Think of a rural school and invariably one imagines students sitting on a damp floor, in a room dimly lit by a 20-watt bulb, crowding around the teacher with tattered sheets to write on...

But if a project envisaged by the Motorola Foundation, an NGO run by mobile phone major Motorola, were to take wings, soon you'll see a virtual classroom in progress at the very same village school, with a teacher from one of the best city schools teaching the students in the hinterland. Motorola has developed a unique wireless broadband solution called `Canopy', which it will use to connect rural India to its urban counterpart through e-education, e-governance and e-health. What this means is that a teacher can simultaneously teach students across five different schools, a doctor can easily reach out to patients in several villages and a farmer can find out the latest price that his produce commands without having to travel miles to the nearest mandi.

Subhendu Mohanty, Senior Director, Motorola, says the company will provide the technical expertise, while the foundation will finance the project. For its pilot e-education project, Motorola has zeroed in on four schools run by the NGO Deepalaya in Delhi. Abhijit Dey, Senior Project Manager of Deepalaya, which educates underprivileged children, explains that it is increasingly difficult to get good teachers for the schools. The technology will enable a select group of teachers to impart lessons to all the schools from a common centre. "Since the technology is interactive, it gives the students a chance to clarify doubts with the teacher as well as interact with students from other schools," he says.

Deepalaya is also trying to organise guest lectures by eminent people from different walks of life. The four schools participating in the Canopy pilot project currently follow the National Open School programme. However, says Dey, the NGO is trying to shift to a Government recognised board examination system. "The idea of the Canopy project is to provide students quality education without having to spend a fortune."

Interestingly, Deepalaya is adding a special feature to the project — a direct line connecting the schools to the President of India, who can then address the students on special occasions — a privilege which even other renowned schools don't have!

Canopy has a great cost advantage, says Mohanty, adding that the wireless broadband technology was evolved for disaster management, to connect areas quickly and in a cost-effective way, wherever communication had broken down completely. "It is much cheaper than setting up a cellular broadband service. All it requires is a desktop, a camera and a terminal."

The system is already running successfully in South Africa. "Here we will implement the project in phases. Depending on the success of the pilot in Delhi, it will be taken to Pondicherry with the help of another NGO, Ritanjali, and later rolled out on a large scale," he adds.

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