Knowledge is certainly power. Chief Minister Laxmikant Parsekar wants that power to bridge the gap between the underprivileged and the privileged. At a recent ceremony to distribute laptops under the cyberage scheme to higher secondary students in Sanguem and Quepem, the chief minister expressed hope that these laptops could be used to acquire knowledge and minimize the gap between the rich and poor, using these laptops as tools.
The ideal is commendable “ providing students with laptops can enrich their learning curve. It can provide access to real time tutorials in school and at home too, it can be used to access educational material from the school online at any time of the day or year. There are many advantages to using these laptops, apart from surfing the net. But here is where the problem lies. Most of these things can’t yet be done.
The cyberage scheme is over a decade old, having started in the early 2000s. In fact, Goa was the first state in India to distribute laptops. Other states have since then followed suit. Some of them have greatly progressed, like Tamil Nadu, which saw enrollment for higher education rise to 26.8 percent, as against the national average of 8.6 percent. Some states like Gujarat and others had hiccups with their own schemes, with accusations of graft and other illegalities stalling most processes. Goa hasn’t been immune to that either. In 2013, there were serious allegations of scams in the cyberage scheme with the Congress even filing a case with the crime branch, alleging graft of over Rs 30 crore in the procurement of tablets.
In his 2016 budget, Parsekar allotted Rs 40 crore for the laptop scheme; in 2015, it was 26 crore for laptops and Rs 50 crore for tablets and notebooks. At the same time, he allotted Rs 25 crore for the upgradation of computer labs in the state, a paltry amount considering the amount of infrastructure and equipment required for a good computer lab. The State is spending a lot of money on one set of tools but there is no allocation of resources to show students how to use those tools. In 2014, the Goa Chamber of Commerce and Industry’s pre-budget memorandum called the tablets and notebooks provided ‘a distraction’, claiming that there was ‘no proper infrastructure for providing IT education in schools.’
What Goa needs is not just computer labs but also proper faculty in all major schools and colleges. Yes, there is a need to educate children on using modern tools for learning but what the Goa government also needs to understand is that it needs to facilitate that learning by making laptops the major tool for learning. This would mean incorporating it into the daily lessons by putting educational material on it, negating the need for textbooks. Then it needs to bring in educational institutions, just like the Centre allocated IIT, to bridge the gap between high schools and working in the IT sector.
The main reason why Goa has a bloated government workforce is the lack of white collar jobs in the State. A proper IT policy will change that, but just building IT parks doesn’t even begin to address the problem. If the State can manage to build the education sector from the ground up using technology as its main tool, it might just be the first state in the country to take education online. Until all that is done, the cyberage scheme is nothing but a populist one.
