IfG.CC -
Institute for eGovernment

A review of the working of the KSHRC and the KSCW by Daksh, an initiative of a group of academics, entrepreneurs, lawyers and teachers and Accountability Initiative, a research initiative for governance accountability, revealed that both commissions were working with inadequate staff.

The report proposes strategies to develop talent, entrepreneurship and infrastructure, improve education and Karnataka's relationship with other countries, develop the ESDM (electronics systems design and manufacturing) sector, ready tier-II and tier-III cities for business expansion and living, and refurbish brand Bangalore.

He was speaking after inaugurating the two-day national conference on 'Trends in developing and managing e-resources in libraries' organized at Jnana Sangama campus of Visvesvaraya Technological University (VTU-Belgaum) here on Friday. The role of librarians is challenging in the era of information and communication technology (ICT), he said.

KVs already boast of one of the highest student-computer ratio. The Kendriya Vidyalaya Sangathan (KVS) plans to provide tablets to students Class IX onwards from 2013. Gaining in strength from 20 schools in 1962-63 to 1,087 in 2012, and catering to over 1.05 million students across India, the KVs have been one of the best performers in the CBSE Board exams. They will now be adding another feather to their cap.

While addressing the gathering he also expressed his grief by noting much of the time of the students gets wasted in completing procedures and lining up to buy and fill up application forms.

“The greatest revolution of our times has been the knowledge explosion, which has changed many of our concepts about education,” said Governor P Sathasivam while inaugurating the e-governance and e-learning system at St Albert’s College, Ernakulam, on Friday.

Addressing students at IIMB’s 39th convocation, Ahluwalia, who is the chairperson of the board of governors of the Indian Council for Research and International Economic Relations (ICRIER), said, “e-governance with back-end integration has contributed greatly to services like getting birth and death certificates, building sanctions, paying property taxes and utility bills. It needs to be implemented in other cities like how it is being done now in Bangalore, Hyderabad, Pune, Mumbai and Surat.

With online education becoming a new trend amid the coronavirus pandemic, its ability to become democratic and egalitarian in terms of its dissemination is highly debatable.

The Kerala High Court passed an interim order on June 3, 2020, which restrained a private school from charging an additional fee for online classes from students of third standard and LKG by observing that the ‘Right to Education is sacrosanct in the Constitution of India’. The High Court made special references to the fact that education shall not be denied under any circumstance to any child in the recent context of the suicide by a Dalit student named Devika who couldn’t attend online classes which commenced on June 1. The court referred to the incident as ‘heart burning’. The Court hence asked the State to make adequate arrangements for learning which are inclusive of all.

The ICT Academy Kerala will be run by an autonomous board of governors with three representations from the state government. The IT industries investing in the project will have to get a clearance from their respective board members. One of the industries, UST Global, is already on board, while three others are expected to ratify their presence by month-end, said Jayasankar Prasad, special officer ICT Academy Kerala.

An official of the general education department said on condition of anonymity, “It is true that the project had ensured good infrastructure in all schools. But, it lacks innovative ideas. They have failed to come up with any innovative new concepts,” he said.

"The Kerala experience, on the other hand, has helped individual schools to take charge of the programme....The ICT curriculum is woven around a variety of Free and Open Source software applications, which extends the range and scope of the learning experiences of students and teachers. Teachers manage the ICT curriculum as well as the IT infrastructure. These practices have demonstrated a heightened sense of ownership and achievement. There is a significant integration of ICT into the regular curriculum", reveals the minutes of the CABE meeting on June

For the first time in the 40-year history of IIM-B , a woman chaired the annual convocation. Kiran Mazumdar Shaw got another woman - noted economist Isher Judge Ahluwalia - as the chief guest. "Our cities are visibly deficient in the services they provide... the state of our cities is far from what we should expect for basic living comfort. It's also far short of what is needed to realize the economic potential of our cities," said

This summer vacation, select Class VIII students of government schools in the district will get an opportunity to nourish their skills in various areas related to information technology (IT).

‘Little Kites’, introduced by the Kerala Infrastructure and Technology for Education (KITE), has decidedtoimpart training for select students in graphics designing, GIS mapping, development of mobile apps, programming, robotics, e-commerce, e-governance, video documentation and web TV.

KIT@School executive director Anvar Sadath said that a day-long ICT awareness session would be conducted first to give parents a broad idea of what this the programme is all about.

'Through this programme, it is intended to educate parents on the ICT tools being used in schools in the state, besides making them ICT literate,' said Sadath.

This would also help improve the quality of e-Governance related works and Madhya Pradesh would soon become a byword for excellence in e-Governance.

The state’s Skill Development and Employment Generation Board is mulling over adding short-term courses on smart city development and advanced technologies in the Industrial Training Institutes (ITIs) and start trade on Internet of Things (IOT) at new centres.

The skill development department is planning to add new trades on technology from the new academic session following 100 per cent admissions in IOT trade included under the pilot project at Ujjain and Bhopal and drone in ITI, Indore. The course on IOT was started at Ujjain and Bhopal with 40 seats each.

A group of youngsters, trained to help spread digital literacy in Maharashtra’s Palghar, is now taking on a larger role

A group of Adivasis, mostly women, some with babies in their arms, sit together in a small, dark room, looking at a big white screen mounted on a wall. The screen is lit by a projector. A young man, a teenager really, clicks a key on a laptop and a video begins playing. The letters on screen are in English, which most of the people in the room cannot read.

Although 82 out of a hundred municipal schools have been transformed into ‘smart schools’ by spending around Rs 50 crores through Smart City, these schools however are facing technical difficulties to run digital classes.

There is a technical problem as the power supply from the old electricity meters in the schools is not enough to run the new electrical equipment. This is causing obstacles for digital classes in schools. As a result, the smart school programme is getting hit.

ICT was made a compulsory subject from this academic year. The exam will be of 50 marks, 10 for practicals and 40 for theory. But the final result will have only grades.

The state board had told the schools that competent teachers from the staff would be given the job to teach the subject and no additional recruitment was made for this.

This is the first such national-level programme for officers at the level of under secretary, section officer, deputy director, assistant director, tehsil and block level officer or equivalent. They will be nominated by their department heads and will need five years' experience to qualify.

The programme comes under the larger National e Governance Programme (NeGP), under which government Mission Mode Projects (MMPs) like core banking and Passport Seva Kendras were executed.