What if with a few clicks on computer, one could pinpoint why students in a particular school in Bihar are doing poorly in Mathematics or why the attendance of girl students is consistently low in schools in a particular block in Maharashtra, or whether a mid-day meal was served to all children in a district in Assam or not?
The education ministry‘s 100-day plan looks to answer these questions and several more to take stock of the true health of our schooling system through its pan-India Vidya Samiksha Kendra (VSK) network.
The aim is that within 100 days every state will have its own VSK centre linked to the national VSK and parameters like student and teachers’ attendance will be digitally available on a real-time basis across all states on a GIS dashboard.
Reason and benefit
The VSK is envisaged as a data warehouse of sorts, soon to be linked from New Delhi to every single school over time – government to private, across states – so as to generate comprehensive and interactive data analytics that can enable data-driven policy interventions and customised decision-making in the schooling system.
“What this essentially means is that policy decisions taken at the state level or even central level can now be based on accurate, verifiable and real-time data parameters that can be interpreted for various policy interventions from administrative to learning levels. For instance, a low student attendance in a particular district clearly points to a need for checking up. A high absence of a science teacher can help understand lower STEM learning levels in a school,” an official associated with the national VSK centre told ET.
The wheels are moving fast to keep the 100-day deadline.
So far, 29 states and Union Territories are already on board, either having launched their own VSK centres or in the final stage of doing so, ET has learnt. The remaining states are being nudged continuously to join in by next month.
ET gathers that Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana have recently came on board and Karnataka, Rajasthan, West Bengal, Ladakh and Lakshadweep will join next month, closing the loop.
The education ministry will be holding marathon orientation sessions and regional reviews through June and July in line with the August 15 deadline. But that is not all.
Attendance data apart, the government’s VSK network is aiming at adding on several layers, including data on school enrolment/dropout from its U-DISE database to school accreditation, teacher training, student performance assessments, NCERT’s National Achievement Survey, PM-Poshan mid-day meal scheme and so on.
