New Delhi, May 2:The IT initiatives of the Directorate of Education, Government of NCT of Delhi entail a comprehensive action plan to usher in ICT enabling governance and academic innovations by addressing issues that have a direct or an indirect bearing on classroom teaching, students performance and accountability of teaching staff including office personnel. The project includes interventions such as computer aided learning in multimedia classrooms, admission of students and tracking their details, school information including geographical boundaries, student feedback, inspection of schools, assessment of classroom teaching, online attendance of students through various web based modules, continuous and comprehensive evaluation of student’s performance etc.
The initiatives also include interventions for personnel and office management in the Directorate such as Employee information system, transfer posting module, finance module, library management, infrastructure module, file track, processing of vigilance cases, processing of court cases, maintenance of electronic documents including Annual Confidential Reports etc. As an outcome of these initiatives, there has been perceptible change in both administrative and academic output of the Department with human intervention and discretion being minimized resulting in a fair, transparent, accountable and responsive system.
The most important aspects of the ICT implementation are following:
* The entire work flow of the Department has been woven into the system such that the users have to work through the system for producing deliverables like mark sheet of a child, rather than entering a data arrived at after a process has taken place.
* The implementation of a particular module is always complete. There has never been a pilot. All the users use the system simultaneously.
* The system is a product of an in-house process having organic growth. The needs are identified, solutions mooted, the simplest possible system implemented, tested and fine-tuned and further complexity introduced gradually till the system becomes complete. As a result, the system has started delivering perceptible results within a few days of its implementation.
* It is conceded that the web based system is not a technical marvel. Any perfection in terms of internationally laid norms is never claimed. But it is ensured every time and at every level that the system delivers the results it is meant for.
* The system has been pro-actively accepted by all the stakeholders. In fact, the Teachers Union claims that Computerization has been achieved as a result of their tireless efforts.
* There is a definite and unprecedented improvement on all the parameters upon which a School Education System can be evaluated.
Project Benefits
1.Results of Class X increased by an unprecedented 11.7% in the year 2006 and by 17.39% in the year 2007. Thus in two years, the improvement in Class X results was more than 28% which is unprecedented in the history of CBSE. Previous best increase have been of the order of 4 to 6 percent in a year.
2.The gap between the pass percentage of private schools and Government Schools in Delhi has been substantially reduced.
3.The number of schools with more than 90% pass percentage have increased from 22 in 2004-05 to 233 in 2006-07 in class X.
4.Attendance of teachers can be verified at a given time by anyone either for individual teachers or groups. Information on this aspect is available in public domain at the Website www.edudel.nic.in
5.The online admission system helped to increase the enrolment of class VI by almost 14% in its first year of implementation. Due to online admission, innumerable man days of parents have been saved because they did not have to make repeated visits to the schools for admissions. As a large number of parents of Delhi Govt. School system are daily wage earners – this means a lot.
6.The discretionary powers of transfers and postings have been done away with as all the transfers and postings are done through a transparent process of computerized transfer system coupled with GIS based postings.
7.Real time communication mechanism has been provided through MIS mail and every important information is now being sent to each individual employee thereby eliminating the information gap. The accurate and efficient financial management system has been able to ensure almost 100% utilization of funds in time. It is now possible to assess the teachers’ performance in respect of each and every teacher of the department ensuring accountability.
8.Entitlements of the teaching and non-teaching staff are now received in time by them due to computerization of financial system.
9.The repairs of schools have improved substantially through the use of online EOR (Extra Ordinary Repairs) tracking system. It tracks the request of repairs from Principal to the PWD by defined channels. As it is computerized, the responsibility for delay at every level can be fixed.
10.Online feed back systems from citizens have been made available in MIS through which any parent or citizen can communicate with Department or with the Minister of Education.
11.Delhi Government has won highest number of medals in 2006-07 in National School Games. The total number of medals won by Delhi was 686 compared to 479 medals won by Maharashtra, who was at second place.
12. The Department of Education has won four National e-Governance Awards in last three years.
Replication in other States
The system being online and the educational system being almost the same in the entire country, the system is entirely replicable.
Not only inter-state but inter-department replicability is also feasible, the functioning of government departments being the same all over the states and country. As an example, the Personnel Management Information System (PMIS) initially implemented by PWD, Delhi and later extended to CPWD in the entire country, was designed, constructed and implemented by the Department of Education for PWD, Delhi, in the first place.
Recently, Govt. of Haryana has started broadcasting multimedia lessons on its edusat. Moreover, talks are on with Punjab Government for implementation of the entire concept in the state. Govt. of Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Andamans have also shown interest in implementation of the programmes developed in Delhi in their respective states.