Bid to bridge the
rural-urban divide
The mission with two major components - content generation
and connectivity - will provide access to electronic journals and
information that is required for collegiate education
THE Hë^ l*t>"*J EypP-EJS aì-Ìf-2-OOt (eocH-irj)
for e-learning which could help cre-
ate high quality e-content for the
students as well as the teachers.
The scheme, submitted by the
Ministry of Human Resource Devel-
opment (MHRD), will leverage the
potential of information and com-
munication technology and is ex-
pected to be a major intervention in
enhancing the Gross Enrolment Ra-
tio (GER) in higher education dur-
ing the Eleventh Five Year Plan pe-
riod as also recommended by the
Oversight Committee and the Na-
Kno'
.agd^ti Aiwa, Director, Information and Library Network, L1GC, Alimedabad,
. m.h.m: ig the five-day national workshop- on DSpace organised bv the Cusat
and.NFL'BNET-UGC.
electronic journals and information
that is required for collegiate educa-
tion.
It will also provide high quality
personalised and interactive knowl-
edge modules through the internet
for all the learners in higher educa-
tion institutions, he said. Already
an amount of Rs 25 crore has been
allocated for the first phase.
In an interview to Express', Jag-
dish Arora said that e-books will not
toe>a-faraway dream though the pub-
lishing industry was not interested
in digitising textbooks,
"In the later stage, the UGC might
finance the writing of the syllabus
THE National Mission on Education
through Information and Communi-
cation Technology (ICT) project will
bridge the gap between urban and
rural institutions as more than 6,000
colleges will be networked across
the country through the UGC-INFO-
NET, said Jagdish Arora, Director
: of Information and l.ibnirv Network
(INFLIBNET!Centre, UGG Aiwneda-¦
bad/ " r-
The mission with two major com-
ponents- content generation and
connectivity-will provide access to
(NKC).
He said that the Department of
Information Technology has initi-
ated a Rs 100-crore project to net-
work all the research institutions
and universities by providing con-
nectivity and increasing the capabil-
ity of the existing networks.
Stressing on the need to digitise
libraries, Arora said that the figures
indicated that the increasing infor-
mation flow has generated an in-
crease in the number of articles and
research papers.
"A library learning is reflected in
terms of the impact on research,"
he added.
The INFLIBNET has already net-
worked 157 universities including 12
private ones in different grada-
The first 5*0 universities have ac-
cess to 5,000 electronic journals, the
second SO to about 4,000 and the last
,57 as per their requirement, he
said.
The private universities are part
of a consortium and they pay for
their subscription.
Arora is in Kochi to participate in
a five-day national workshop on
DSpace organised by the Cochin
University of Science and Technol-
ogy, the INFLIBNET and HP India