E for English Education

Comat rural business centres turn into live e-classrooms in Haryana villages offering English courses through compact discs and through a VSAT link.

Singing in English in a small village in Haryana. Well, they are not exactly singing. But chanting along with a teacher who is taking classes for them from far- off Chandigarh. Miles away. It is their spaceless classroom with students spread over several villages in Haryana.

The classrooms are alive and chanting the moment the clock strikes four in the evening. Girls and boys back from colleges and schools troop to the E Disha centres in 300 villages in Haryana's five districts. The class is on.

The teacher is there with a Good Afternoon greeting on the screen of the computer at Sampla village in Sampla block, Rohtak district, as the hot April sun streams into the room from all sides.

The computer is unmindful of the sun and beams the smiling teacher to a small group of four enthusiastic girls.

Now for words with io in them says the teacher. And students sitting in a similar room in Bhadsa quickly respond. Coin. Not to be beaten, the four girls wrack their brains and prompt a word to the compute assistant in the Sampla centre : Soil.

The teacher, happy at the response, now wants words conveying relationships. So the kids say niece, nephew, brother and so on. The classes go on till 6 pm. They get some homework for the next afternoon. The chanting is put off to the next day.

The English speaking course of the BBC powered by the VSAT link provided by Hughes Communication India Ltd at the E Disha centres is being lapped up by village girls and boys across Haryana.

The centres are 1,200-odd common service centres or rural business centres run by Comat Technologies covering 7,000 villages in the country including Karnataka, Haryana, Sikkim ,Tripura and Uttar Pradesh. The newest chapters have been set up in the NorthEast and Uttaranchal.

Not all the centres are under the CSE scheme of the Ministry of Information and Technology. Some are run independently by Comat. In Hyderabad, slum children have made their first animation film after training at a similar centre started by Nasscom Foundation "" a collaboration of several IT companies to do corporate social responsibility together.

Here again the VSAT provider is Hughes. Nasscom Foundation has opened its innings now in Uttar Pradesh with several Nasscom Knowledge centres, and the primary service is education and skill development, chairman Saurabh Srivastava says. At Bhadsa village in Jhajjar district of Haryana, E Disha has students from neighbouring schools who are learning their first lessons in computers.

E Disha is already providing online coaching tutorials for entrance examinations for engineering and medical colleges. "The coaching is being provided at our centres in Karnataka where were have tied up with coaching institutes," says Sriram Raghavan, founder and president, Comat technologies.

The students pay a fee of Rs 640 for computer courses that last a month. The fee for English speaking is 2,000 for a 3-month English speaking course. In Jhajjar district there are 45 students and 45 in Rohtak.

Soon 300 village classrooms will begin to teach English in Uttar Pradesh, Comat officials say. In Dhasa village in Haryana bordering Delhi, Manoj Kumar, the son of a share cropper, is doing his class 12th and is keen to learn the basics of computers. Krishan, another student at the E Disha class room in Dhasa, says his father has sold two acres to Reliance. Kumar aspires to join an engineering college.

Hughes has lined up more courses for students across the country through its V SAT facility, including a course for engineering students. In the rural scenario, Comat and Hughes are working out a programme to provide coaching for medical and engineering entrance at a fee of Rs 24,000. Also coming soon is a course in retail, targeting rural centres in Haryana.