Bandahalli Village’s Government School shows Way for Digital India

The Digital India programme is a flagship programme of the Narendra Modi Government with a vision to transform India into a digitally empowered society and knowledge economy.

The Digital India programme is centred on three key vision areas:

1. Digital infrastructure as a core utility to every citizen;
2. Governance and services on demand; and
3. Digital empowerment of citizens.

Beginning of e-Governance in India:

The journey of e-Governance initiatives in India took a broader dimension in mid 90s for wider sectoral applications with emphasis on citizen-centric services. Later on, many States and Union Territories started various e-Governance projects.

Despite the successful implementation of many e-Governance projects across the country, e-Governance as a whole had not been able to make the desired impact and fulfil all its objectives.

In order to transform the entire ecosystem of public services through the use of information technology, the Government of India has launched the Digital India programme.

Success achieved by Digital India programme:

For most the biggest success of Digital India programme will be that upon its launch it was able to attract pledges worth 4.5 lakh crore from major industrialists of India.

Many would also be tempted to quote digital product of Kotak Mahindra Bank 'Jifi' as one of the success stories of Digital India or Da Milano's digital presence and marketing as its success stories.

However, not many would know about Bandahali Village's Government school.

Bandahali Village's Government School gets inspired by Digital India programme:

However, government school of Bandahali Village of Karnataka can be called the real success story of Digital India programme. The village is located 60 km from Mysuru.

The school's website http://ghsbandahallikrn.org is set to be formally launched tomorrow. The site will have school's study material online. The headmaster of the school Dr. Suresh has also put up solved question papers, exam time table and photos of the school students.

Dr. Suresh is PhD in Education got the idea of creating a website for school in September 2015 when lot of talk was going on about Digital India.

He wanted the website to be made to prove that government schools can be at par with private school. Dr. Suresh first shared his idea with English teacher Subbaraman and they made the initial plan. After spending Rs. 15,000 on design and contacting a website designer in Mysuru the plan achieved concrete success.

Initially the website was to be only in Kannada. Later the content was added in English too. Dr. Suresh also spent Rs. 6,000 from his own pocket and got a UPS put in school to beat power cuts and began teaching his students on the big screen using computer.

Five years back he set up a computer section in his school and got 13 computers sanctioned by the government.

The website will cater to the staff of the school too by putting up important notices and circulars coming from Education Department on the site.

The school has only 107 students all of them come from families where agriculture is the main source of income. The tiny school has a staff of seven of which two are support staff and five are teachers.