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Haryana forgets ‘quality’ EDUSAT for its schools
Geetanjali Gayatri
Tribune News Service

Ambala/Yamunanagar, November 24
In government schools of Haryana, “quality education” is in ‘safe custody’ — locked in wooden cabinets, wrapped up in cobwebs and hidden under the layers of dust.

The state’s ambitious “quality education” project through satellite, EDUSAT, seems to have bitten the dust nearly seven years after being launched by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. Its equipment — television sets, batteries, the UPS and set-top boxes -- lies in school store rooms, forgotten and discarded.

Like in Nauoni’s Government Senior Secondary School (GSSS) where the system was last seen working in April 2012. “There has been no signal since then. The batteries are not working, the UPS is not functional. After repeated complaints, we were told that the batteries were not available,” explains a staff member, opening the lock of the cabinet that has the equipment.

In Government Primary School (GPS), Khuda Khurd, even opening the wooden cabinet fitted with the system is an exercise. As two students slowly pull down a string that goes all around the cabinet to hold its doors together and lift them, a cloud of dust rises. The mesh of cobwebs is cleared by the students as the teacher instructs the children to press a button. Nothing happens.

She asks them to press another dust-covered button. Still nothing happens. Finally, she bends over and gives a third instruction when a green light suddenly comes on.

“There has been no signal for months. We have forgotten how to operate it,” she says apologetically. Maintaining that the “no signal” message blinks on the screen most of the time, she adds, “The batteries have been dead for very long and we get power only for an hour during school time.

Now, we don’t even bother to switch it on. Anyway, the lessons don’t even hold the interest of the children.” The television set has not even been switched on in the GSSS, Ambala Cantt (BC), in the last three years. The set lies locked in a classroom-turned-storeroom where students watched EDUSAT programmes.

“The floods nearly three years ago damaged the entire equipment. Every month, routinely, the school is asked if the equipment is functional and EDUSAT is running. We write a ‘no’ and send that report. However, during all these years, nobody has ever come to ask us why or even bothered to know the problem. It has been going on for so long that we have forgotten that the government had given us this facility,” the staff remarks.

The lessons in English, too, proved to be the programme’s undoing, if the teachers are to be believed. “Before the technical snag disrupted the signal, children watched the content but followed nothing since most of the lessons were in English.

They could not pick up anything from the programme,” a staff member at Government Middle School (GMS), Rattanheri, said. The school has two television sets stacked in the cabinet, but neither serves any purpose.

A teacher maintains that the second set was handed over to them after a nearby school was closed down. “We have even thought of buying a DVD player to show some movies to the children since the other equipment is completely useless and nobody has bothered to attend to our repeated complaints,” he says. Whether it is the GHS, Salarheri, or the GPS, Bhamboli, the GPS, Khundaywala, in Jagadhri or any other school, the EDUSAT programme has either failed miserably in schools or is struggling for survival.