Rajasthan
Education improvement drive
Addressing the Rajasthan legislative assembly after tabling the state budget 2015-16 on March 9, chief minister Vasundhara Raje announced her government’s intent to constitute District School Boards (DSBs) for monitoring the quality of education delivered by government schools statewide. DSBs, whose members will include parents, teachers, civil society and public representatives and district administrators, will publish annual reports on quality improvements in government primary-secondaries in each district.
Referring to the Annual Status of Education Report 2014, Raje highlighted the poor learning outcomes of students enroled in Rajasthan’s rural government schools and announced an allocation of Rs.21,788.97 crore for school education in 2015-16, a 16 percent increase over the revised 2014-15 budget.
Raje also proposed rollout of a State Higher Education Development Plan over a period of eight years to establish greenfield colleges, universities and professional schools.
Haryana
Monthly tests for children
The ministry of school education has kick-started a process of conducting monthly tests to monitor the performance of class I-VIII students in government schools statewide, a senior official of the State Council of Educational Research and Training said while addressing media personnel in Gurgaon on March 4.
“We have been receiving complaints that since introduction of the Right to Education Act, 2009 which prohibits exams for children in elementary education, schools are not able to evaluate students’ performance,” the official said. School managements have been asked to upload the results of the proposed monthly tests online to inculcate a spirit of competition, he added.
“Every government school will have to report the performance of its students in detail. However, even under the new scheme, exams will not be used to fail children,” says Prem Lata Yadav, district elementary education officer, Gurgaon.
Bihar
Ricoh-Super 30 joint initiative
Japan’s well-known imaging and electronics company Ricoh has signed a partnership agreement with Anand Kumar, founder of the much-acclaimed Super 30 educational programme which prepares students of underprivileged households for the IIT-JEE, to provide quality primary education to government schools in Bihar under a UN programme, a state government official informed the media in Patna on March 1.
“In the first phase, we will focus on primary education and later take it forward in other directions, including environment education,” says Takanobu Tanaka, a senior official of the Tokyo-based company.
Lauding Kumar’s efforts to help students from poor households to qualify for the IITs, Tanaka added: “India has the largest population of young people in the world, but many children cannot study due to poverty. We want to make technology accessible to underprovided government schools and help them use it effectively to build capacity.”
Gujarat
Skill Up India portal launch
Silicon Valley-based Code for India (CFI), a network of Indian-origin technology professionals, has launched a free-of-charge education portal Skill Up India in Ahmedabad, Karl Mehta, founder of CFI and CEO of educational technology company EdCast, informed the media in Ahmedabad on March 13. The launch was initiated by CFI’s Gujarat chapter in partnership with iCreate, IIT-Gandhinagar, IIM-Ahmedabad, CIIE and the US-India Business Council.
“Skill Up India is a new countrywide movement to provide youth free access to high quality education through online and mobile media, to prepare a workforce to meet the demands of a global economy,” said Mehta, speaking on the occasion.
“Learning is not a one-way process... We will democratise teaching capabilities of every individual. If you are good at teaching a particular subject, you can become a teacher to the rest of the country,” he added.
CFI also intends to provide content in regional languages with some content already available in Hindi. The Skill Up India education portal is supported by iCreate, an autonomous body guided by an advisory board led by Infosys founder-chairman N.R. Narayana Murthy.
Odisha
SQAAS starts rolling
In response to a directive issued last year by the Delhi-based Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) to all affiliated schools making accreditation compulsory within the next three years, CBSE schools in Bhubaneswar have initiated the process of acquiring accreditation from the School Quality Assessment and Accreditation Scheme (SQAAS) of the board, said a senior CBSE official addressing the media in Bhubaneswar on March 26.
According to the CBSE spokesperson, SQAAS has been introduced to set educational standards and enhance the quality of education, infrastructure, human resources and performance of all 15,800 CBSE affiliated schools countrywide.
Paromita Sengupta with bureau inputs