India has a shortage of approx. 4,00,000 Secondary Schools. In Bihar for instance out of 8463 gram panchayats, 5500 of them do not have a secondary school and families who are unable to afford sending their children outside to study are forced to pull them out of school after class IV.
Given the very large shortages in physical school capacity and associated poor teacher quality issues across the nation, it is not practical or feasible to build the entire secondary school capacity that is required. To overcome these problems the Vivekanand Education Megaproject will deploy ICT on a very large scale to reach the remotest villages in India.
Specifically, the Megaproject will build 30,000 New Secondary Schools across 29 states and 7 Union Territories. Each of these Hub schools will in turn share its teachers and teaching tools using ICT, with 14 other schools in its area to cover a total of 4,20,000 existing schools across the Nation.
The following reference documents, prepared by Infodev, Pricewaterhouse Coopers ( supported by the World bank ) will serve as guidance material for the development and deployment of ICT tools
To test ICT project concepts, a number of small pilot projects are planned over the next 2 – 3 years. The first of these pilots will be a Financial Efficiency improvement project.