CSC Partners With NEC Corporation, IIT Delhi To Empower Rural Students

In a bid to empower rural students with access to quality education, Common Services Centre (CSC) has partnered with Japanese technology giant NEC Corporation and IIT Delhi.

Beginning this endeavour, CSC, NEC Corporation and IIT Delhi jointly organized a hackathon on “Digitalising rural education” on Saturday.

In the hackathon, 30 teams selected  from all over the country participated in brainstorming sessions organised to develop ideas to simplify education delivery to students living in rural India. Both CSC and NEC Corporation will jointly design and develop tools and products for rural students.

“Education is our foundation. However it is very disappointing that only 30% Indians go to college and mostly from the urban areas. The real problem of rural India is that most of the investment in last 70 years has been centered around cities. To rural India, we have given subsidies and that has created mindset in rural citizens that everything they are getting is second standard and therefore the new thinking needs to happen for rural India”, said CSC SPV CEO Dr. Dinesh Tyagi.

“CSC’s presence in every gram panchayat will help students to have access to these tools. In addition, CSC has also opened 6000 educational academies in every development block, that aims to solve basic problems in education like language barrier, dropout ratio etc,” Dr Tyagi further said.

TakaYuki Inaba, Managing Director, NEC technologies said: “This hackathon together with CSC and IIT-Delhi will give the platform for the ideas to empower the rural India in terms of education, financial inclusion. Our technologies will create the new opportunities and bring the value to the citizens of India as well as CSC.”

“Our country’s problem needs to be solved by our country’s young people. Country’s young generation is full of energy however there is lack of facilitation in terms of ambience, events, and guidance so that they can undertake these challenges. This hackathon is one such opportunity to bring out new ideas that are feasible in terms of money, business perspective, and technology perspective so that we can take the education forward in every hook and corner of the country,” said Mr Jyoti Kumar, Associate Professor, Department of Design, IIT Delhi.

According to Mr Kumar, today technology has advanced so much that student sitting in India can listen to a lecture in USA but the real problem is that students in rural India does not have access to these technologies. “We need to create solutions, products so that so that people are able to have access to same facilities, which the urban India has.”―CELLIT