Steps taken to transform school education: Dr Ranjan
Source: Chronicle News Service

Imphal, March 18 2023: Union minister of state for education and external affairs Dr RK Ranjan has stated that the Central government under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and home minister Amit Shah has taken up several steps to bring digital transformation in education.

In a statement, the Union MoS said that the Centre is transforming the country under the Digital India policy with the objective to revolutionise the empowerment processes and growth of the country with high speed.

This government is giving prime importance to the development of the Northeast India for the simple reason that it has been neglected since long and it is lagging behind in all spheres of development.

The government felt that the country could not achieve the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 2030 without changing the Na tional Education Policy.

Therefore, National Education Policy 2020 was launched with the objective to prepare the younger generation for employability as per the need of the 21st century.

With this object, the government launched Samagra Shiksha Abhiyan, an integrated scheme for school education in 2018 19.It envisages the school' as a continuum from pre-school, primary, upper primary, secondary to senior secondary levels.

It is an overarching programme for school education sector extending from pre-school to class XH and aims to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education at all levels of school education.

Samagra Shiksha is implemented in partnership with all the states and UTS for various components including strengthening smart classrooms.

However, implementation of Samagra Shiksha lies with the state/UT governments as education is in the concurrent list of the Constitution and majority of the schools are under the administrative control of the respective state governments and UT administration.

In this budget, a financial provision of one-time non-recurring grant of Rs 2.40 lakh and recurring grant of Rs 0.38 lakh have been allocated per school for a period of five years.

Till date 82,120 smart classrooms have been sanctioned under Samagra Shiksha and 18,783 smart class rooms have been made functional throughout the country of which 311 smart classrooms were approved and functional in the state of Manipur for the year 2021-22 .

Subsequently, in 2022-23,140 smart class rooms were approved and made functional 77 class rooms.

Now, there are 451 smart classrooms approved for the state during 2020 21 and 2022- 23, out of which 388 smart classrooms are functional.

The state has 2889 government schools and only 340 schools have internet connections.

Students of the state have limited access to digital literacy in comparison with neighbouring states like Mizoram and Nagaland.

However, with this budgetary provision, the government will be able to provide digital education to more students.

A sum of Rs 12.2 crore was sanctioned for development of smart classrooms and Rs 11.5 crore for 1CT sanctioned for digital transformation to the state from 2019 20 to 2022-23, the statement said while thanking union minister of education Dharmendra Pradhan for the assistance and chief minister N Biren for successful implementation of digital education in Manipur.

Comment