National Policy on ICT in School Education

ICT Usage in 1000 Schools of India

Vivek Bharadwaj
Special Secretary
Deparment of IT, Government of West Bengal
vivekbharadwaj@hotmail.com

Source: digitalLEARNING Magazine, November-2007

The access to ICT facilities whether by students or by teachers is of great concern in India. Less than six computers per school and one computer for seventy two students is the average here One of the major objectives of the study was to show the relationship between technology use and changes in teaching and learning process, as well as educational curricular improvements.

In view of the large size of the country and the fact that the number of primary and secondary schools run into hundreds of thousands, two representative States were selected – Gujarat in Western India and Karnataka in South India. Again two Districts in two different areas of the States were selected for the Pilot project. Schools in the capital cities of the two States were also surveyed to reflect the different stages of development in the use of ICT in teaching and learning.

The survey used multistage random sampling and the sample unit was the school. This methodology produced the following sample size:

Number of schools : 1000.
Number of teachers : 6239.
Number of students : 35,547.

The survey took place in the early part of 2004. Out of the 1,000 schools surveyed, 500 each were in the States of Gujarat in the West and Karnataka in the South of the Country. Out of these 500 schools, 200 each were in the Districts of Patan and Surendranagar in Gujarat and Bellary and Mandya in Karnataka. 100 schools each were also assessed in the capital cities of Ahmedabad in Gujarat and Bangalore in Karnataka. In Gujarat the ratio of the number of urban schools to rural ones was 26:65.8 and in Karnataka it was 37.6:53.6.

A majority of the schools surveyed in both the States were Government or Public Schools. Out of the 1,000 schools, 602 (60.2%) were Government Schools and 398 (39.8%) were Private Schools. Out of the total 1,000 schools 49.7% were primary and 51.3% were secondary. The total number of students enrolled in these 1,000 schools were 2,24,018. Out of these 1,21,029 were in Gujarat and 1,02,989 were in Karnataka.