Effective Planning and Implementation of RTE Act 2009

• Effective planning and implementation of RTE Act 2009
• Administrative transparency
• Community collaboration

Situation

Madhya Pradesh (MP) is the second largest state of India with largest tribal population amongst all states. School education is the largest sector in the state in terms of number of beneficiaries, geographical reach, number of institutions, and engagement of human resources. It is also the most complex sector with multiple departments and local bodies exercising control over the work force engaged in it. Over the last two decades, the workload of the departments, institutions and offices dealing with school education has increased manifold without corresponding increase in the quantity and capability of the supervisory staff.

Implementation of the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act 2009 requires the state to provide free elementary education and ensure compulsory admission, attendance and completion of elementary education by all children between 6-14 years. The inception of RTE Act in 2009 has levied additional expectations on the state-school education departments, to be able to provide transparent and accountable governance apart from ensuring quality education to the masses.

The major challenges faced by MP government in achieving the objective of quality education and proactive governance is to ensure enrolment of over 1.60 crore children, retention and achievement of minimum learning levels, management and administration of schools, tracking of movement of employees and timely payments of salaries. In addition, the government also needs to manage, coordinate, and synchronize multiple administrative units under multiple departments.

Considering the complex scenario and spread of the activities at habitat level, there were no reliable and integrated systems to facilitate the functioning in an efficient and integrated manner. The state did a SWOT analysis with department officials and teachers and analyzed the key issues, problems,strengths and shortcomings of the prevailing system of governance, and opportunities and potential threats.

It emerged that effective management and monitoring of such a large sector required an integrated, common and concurrent system that works in real-time. There was need for universal provisioning of basic schooling; and ensuring quality education in schools by increasing capacity of teachers, students and education managers.

Solution

With all these challenges, the idea of developing a bi-lingual, database driven, dynamic portal for all the schools under the Department of Education and the Department of Tribal Development was conceived. This led to the conceptualization, analysis, design, development and implementation of an integrated, online e-Governance portal, It facilitates concurrent functioning in real-time. MP government implemented the portal in technical collaboration with National Informatics Centre, Madhya Pradesh, Bhopal.

After a lengthy consultation process, it was decided to build the portal on Microsoft ASP .NET framework powered by the capabilities of Microsoft SQL Server 2005. “We chose a Microsoft solution because of its ease of use,” says Shri. Sunil Jain, Director - Technical, NIC Bhopal. “And the key advantage of using SharePoint technology was its flexibility and superior scalability.”

The portal went live in August 2008 with the Human resources module. Based on a model of continuous deployment and improvement, NIC Madhya Pradesh has since launched several new services. The portal addresses all stakeholders of the state education system namely students, teachers, citizens and educational managers. It provides not only a common platform for interaction and information sharing for all school employees related to school education, but also serves as a platform for dissemination of information, taking decisions based on support systems and exchange of ideas.

Dynamic in nature, the portal captures all transactions, brings qualitative and credible information instantly for the decision makers. This is important to ensure that the state government is complying with all encompassing Right to Education Act.

Madhya Pradesh has made dramatic improvements in the achievement levels by the primary school children as can be reflected from the improved results for the state. The portal has recorded nearly one crore hits in the last 24 months, which reflect its usage in real time.

“Effective implementation of the RTE Act 2009 along with better administration has been the major gains of this project,”Shri. Manoj Jhalani, Commissioner- Rajya Shiksha Kendra Bhopal.“Providing quality education to nearly 1.6 crore children including under privileged children along with ensuring better resource management have been the high points in the project's implementation.”

Benefits

The Education Portal has been developed using Microsoft SQL Server and is being used to automate, streamline and reengineer various processes and functions involved in the governance of the schools, and managing the beneficiaries, staff and other entities of the school education system. The huge social impact of this portal and its usability makes this project stand out amongst the rest. Students, teachers, and parents are now well versed with the technologies as they are using it for their day-to-day activities.

Effective Planning and Implementation of RTE Act 2009

The Portal has been designed to implement the RTE Act and facilitate proactive and transparent governance, thereby enhancing the quality of education for the State of MP. Use of portal has helped the MP state to be the first State in the country to set-up the system that reports on compliance to RTE Act. The portal totally addresses the needs of students, teachers, citizens and educational managers in the spirit of the intentions of RTE Act 2009, expectations of RTI Act 2005, objectives of SSA.

Administrative Transparency

The portal includes a well-integrated suite of e-governance applications and facilitates a common platform that fulfills the needs for all school education related services and a single source of authentic and live information for all stakeholders and participating departments and agencies. “To be effective, a portal must be alive with the latest content,” says Shri. Manoj Jhalani, Commissioner- Rajya Shiksha Kendra Bhopal. “This solution gives us the tools to easily make such updates. With up-to-date information, the school - government interaction and information sharing achieves the much needed transparency.”

The portal is also unique in fulfilling the intentions of RTI Act 2005 in the most comprehensive manner by facilitating online dissemination of all the information related to governance, key processes and entities to common public thereby enabling public scrutiny, oversight and social audit.

Community Collaboration

All the stakeholders in the educational process—schoolchildren, teachers, parents, and administrators—use the portal to collaborate on educational processes. The portal influences more than 80 percent of the families whose children are undergoing education in state and covers every village/habitat scattered up to the remotest corner of state. More than two lakh teachers have registered themselves on the portal and created their e-Service books and entered necessary information.

“Using SQL Server, we developed a portal that the entire education system in the state can use and rely upon,” says Shri. Sunil Jain, Director-Technical, NIC Bhopal.

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