Bridging Digital Divide in India to create equal opportunities.

Internet, which is considered to be the treasure house of knowledge orthe information superhighway, makes a huge difference as far as dissemination of information is concerned. But unfortunately in India the Internet penetration is too low. The Indian population could be classified as the people who have access to internet and those who don’t have access to it. There are many reasons to this disparity. The most important are the infrastructure bottlenecks (low bandwidth) and the economic status.  Those who have access to this vital source of knowledge are able to make rapid progress and grab the opportunities leaving their less fortunate brethren behind. In some developed countries, they made access to Internet a fundamental right. In US where around 75% of the people have access to this treasure house, have set an ambitious target for themselves to provide all their citizens with high speed Internet by 2020. They think that it is one of the ways they can maintain their technological and economic superiority. They also started taking measures to effectively counter the cyber attacks and protect their information networks.

Internet has become an essential source for acquiring knowledge. In fact it is a very fascinating thing. Take the example of a newspaper. Every morning you get a hard copy of the newspaper delivered at your doorsteps. We eagerly grab it and start reading as it has something new to offer. Humans by nature seek new things everyday. Research findings revealed that not more than 10% of the readers read beyond first chapter after they buy a book. So it is obvious that the remaining people, after reading some more pages or chapters shelve it because it has become old and it no longer attracts their attention. But in case of a newspaper every morning we get a new copy and that is why we get fascinated by it. But take Internet. It has something new to show us every minute in fact every second. So when I sit in front of my networked computer I rarely turn my eyes from it. It has got every thing I want. I can not only access information but even share the information with others. 

So to improve the educational standards in our country we need to device a plan to provide every school going child with a networked laptop. In fact there is a program called One Laptop per Child started by MIT labs. This laptop is very sturdy and runs on open source LINUX based software called Sugar.

OLPC Project has made a start in India with a pilot deployment in a rural village at Khairat near Navi Mumbai where laptops have been deployed and every child carries one laptop home.

Just imagine a teacher teaching Geography lesson and the students in the classroom use Google Earth to locate the countries, water bodies and observe the terrain of different locations. How effective the teaching-learning process would be!

Note: For full version visit  (http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/blogs/eggheadedram/bridging-digital-divide-india-create-equal-opportunities)