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Education IT

Ministerial panel to draft India schools’ ICT policy

By Alice Kok | 29 December 2008

Human Resource Development (HRD) Minister Arjun Singh has ordered the constitution of a new ministerial committee to draft the national policy for introduction of ICT in schools and directed that future policy formulation should not be outsourced’ to private parties.

A Joint Secretary driven ministerial committee has now been instituted to draft a national policy on ICT at schools. The committee will hold consultations with all stakeholders and a formulation of policy should be in place in another six months.

The ministry announced the need for a National Policy on ICT in School Education in 2007, for which it initiated a consultative process along with Global e-Schools and Communities Initiative (GeSCI) and CSDMS to address the needs and challenges for teaching and learning in the 21st century using technology tools.

Several educationists and NGOs were up in arms against the consultative committee, headed by NCERT joint director Vasudha Kamat, as they felt this could compromise the nature and intent of the policy, bringing in technology vendors to help frame what was essentially an educational policy. The draft prepared by the Kamat-led committee would only be used as a reference draft at best and consultations with all stakeholders involved from states to educationists, NGOs and experts will now be carried on by the ministerial committee.

IT for Change, a Bangalore-based non-profit organisation, wrote to Singh last month: “The ministry asked GeSCI to lead the policy making process, who in turn further outsourced this task to CSDMS. Both are private organisations with no experience with the Indian public education system and its priorities. They have closely associated technology vendors such as Intel, NIIT, Microsoft, Educomp etc, and large private monopolies with vested interests in the policy. These organisations have also excluded from their consultations, the large body of educationists, many of whom were an important part of the framing of the NCF 2005, a landmark curricular policy in India.”

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