Ekal E-Shiksha

I serve as the CEO of Ekal Abhiyan, a movement that is focused on the holistic development of rural and tribal villages across India and Nepal. We currently run 102,000 single-teacher primary schools in remote rural villages in India and Nepal. Along with primary education, we also work on health, organic farming, and skill training in the villages.

Prior to joining Ekal, I served as Chairman & Managing Director for National Aluminum Co. for 6 years. I have also worked in other public sector enterprises including RITES (Rail India) and Botswana Railways as the CFO. I joined Ekal in 2013 as volunteer CEO to fulfill my dream of doing meaningful work to serve the underprivileged.

Chartered Accountant by training, I come from a small desert village in Rajasthan, and I feel honored to have the opportunity to serve the most vulnerable and marginalized people living in remote villages.

I am committed to bridging the urban-rural digital divide so that rural children can find a productive role in the digital economy of the future.

Ekal Vidyalaya currently runs single teacher schools in over 100,000 remote rural villages, and we have recently introduced digital literacy program in a small number of the schools. The educational content is provided on tablets, which helps the children become digitally literate and allows us to expand our curriculum. The apps on the tablet empower the children to be self-learners, an important skill for today’s learner. We want to scale up this project to serve all our schools.

By providing digital literacy to over 2.8 million children in extremely marginalized communities, we will serve as an equalizer: a child living in a remote village will be able to dream of a life out of poverty and filled with opportunity.

Our goal is to reduce the digital divide between urban and rural India.  The pandemic has acutely focused our attention on this divide, as the “digital haves” can continue to access education, healthcare, and other services remotely, while the “digital have-nots” are left behind.  As India leapfrogs into the digital age, this divide only further widens the economic gap between marginalized people living in remote villages and urban residents. It is imperative to provide at least basic digital literacy to children to enable them to have a future in this newly digitized society. 

While access to digital education is easily available for children in urban areas, this access is woefully lacking for children living in remote rural areas. The lack of digital infrastructure results in a less robust curriculum compared to urban schools that can use the educational software to supplement their classes. The divide in digital literacy persists, despite technology becoming more affordable and connectivity growing by leaps and bounds. It behoves us to make use of technology to reduce the digital divide and to use online learning opportunities to democratize access to high quality curriculum. 

E-Shiksha, which means E-education, will enable students enrolled in Ekal primary schools to learn to use and by using a digital tablet.

The project involves disseminating tablets that are preloaded with programs including KitKit, an open-source educational software that was a winner of the Global X-Prize in learning. KitKit software has been adapted to the target population. With these tablets, we will be able to address topics beyond literacy that are often difficult to teach. Of particular interest is the digital curriculum for girls on menstruation and self-protection. There are government resources that are developed by experts and will provide a great addition to our current curricular offerings. The teacher will use these tablets in class to supplement their lessons, and students will be able to learn through exciting interactive media. Students will also be able to take the tablets home for limited periods of time, allowing them to learn while social distancing if necessary.

The addition of tablets with educational software to our schools will enable rural teachers and children in Ekal schools to learn in an increasingly-online environment, improving digital literacy in the villages.

Our project will reach the 2.8 million children enrolled in our 100,000 schools in rural remote villages in India. These are some of the most marginalized communities in the world. Bringing digital literacy to these areas can open up tremendous opportunities and help leapfrog development in these areas. Studies have shown that the differential annual income for a digitally literate person today is approximately $1300. Most importantly, we want to open the minds of the children to the vast opportunities they have in the world.

The tribal people living in remote areas have been ignored for generations. Our first intervention was to provide access to literacy.  Ekal Vidyalaya introduced an innovative single teacher school model where we take a local youth and train her to be a teacher.

We have already piloted tablets in a small number of Ekal schools. The addition of tablets to the curriculum has had a tremendous positive impact. Children are more excited to come to school. We can easily offer an expanded curriculum in an engaging manner. The project is allowing the children to reach out and touch the future where perhaps they will no longer be marginalized and ignored.

My area of work is with tribal villagers living in remote rural villages who have had very little opportunity for advancement. The lack of infrastructure in these areas makes it difficult to bring opportunities to the villagers.  Access to technology and digital literacy have the potential to democratize access to opportunities. In addition to education, E-Shiksha tablets can also be used for online access to markets, for tele-medicine, for data collection, etc. The possibilities are endless, and these opportunities can serve as a great equalizer for the tribal peoples, allowing them to live richer lives.

Ekal Vidyalaya was started over 30 years ago with a strong motivation to provide opportunities for the tribal population in remote rural villages who have traditionally been ignored by the society at large. Ekal’s first project was to bring literacy to these areas, which required great innovation as the traditional school model did not work well.

As we moved into 21st century, I saw the importance of imparting digital literacy to our students. One day, I saw my nephew was using his iPads to complete his homework; in talking to him, I realized how his school was using technology to completely revamp their curriculum. Inspired by how widespread technology-based education was becoming in Delhi, I wanted to bring that same opportunity to the Ekal students. I was able to get a donation of a few tablets, and decided to begin the experiment in a cluster of 30 schools in Uttarakhand four years ago. Alongside my team of volunteers and educators, we carefully planned out the content and the mode of distribution so they could be integrated into the schools in a seamless manner. The successful pilot inspired me to expand this digital element to all Ekal schools across the country.

I come from a desert village in Rajasthan. It was my access to education that allowed me to emerge from a village setting and eventually become the CEO of National Aluminium Co., a star public sector enterprise. As a boy coming from a rural background, I know the challenges that villagers face in terms of social mobility. Growing up, I promised myself that once I completed my familial obligations, I would quit my job and dedicate myself to the cause of rural development. Ekal was the perfect platform for me to make a difference in the development of India, and I was given the honor to be the CEO of this organization.

As I saw the dawn of the digital age, I could see the potential of these technologies to allow the children in these villages to have access to tools that can pull them out of poverty. The entirety of scientific knowledge as well as cultural heritage of various groups in India is available in cyberspace. By training children on the use of digital tools, one can democratize access to high quality education and give every child the knowledge to succeed in the current economy.

My passion for the upliftment of rural communities, my extensive experience leading and modernizing large public sector organizations, and my time serving as the CEO of Ekal Vidyalaya puts me in a unique position to bring digital literacy to Ekal schools. With my extensive prior experience in the corporate sector, I have established a strong network in the business world that allows me access to technology for the project. One of the marked achievements of Ekal is that we have been able to scale our operations to reach over 100,000 villages where we have a live and credible presence. We can quickly and efficiently bring a new project into these villages, localize and pilot it, make changes, and implement it in 100,000 villages.

Ekal has excellent relationships with the best technology minds in India. Prof Ganesh Ramakrishnan, a professor of Artificial Intelligence at IIT Mumbai, serves on our advisory board.  In the pilot phase of this project we have already figured out the issues around security, pedagogy and use of the tablets. Our teachers are village youth who already attend training sessions each month; this time can be easily adapted to teach them about new technology tools. With all hardware prices coming down, access to free educational software enabled and data connectivity coming to the villages, I believe we are perfectly primed for starting the process to eliminate the digital divide. I am excited to see this move forward.

Perhaps the most challenging situation I have faced is the onset of the pandemic, COVID-19. While the pandemic was scary for all, the challenge was manifold for rural remote villages. These areas have little or no existing healthcare infrastructure to support the population. My top priority was to ensure their safety. Thus, I was faced with the daunting task of preparing Ekal villages against COVID-19, which included teaching them social distancing protocol. 

I decided to leverage all the tools at our disposal. As we were bringing digital literacy to the villages, our teachers and other workers were also adept at using cell phones and tools like WhatsApp. I created a communication infrastructure whereby the central team would disperse messages to the leaders of the different areas in the morning, and each leader would then use the Ekal infrastructure to percolate the information down to the village level. The training for quarantine was enforced diligently. In addition, I mobilized the women trained in the tailoring centers to make masks. To date, we have distributed over 2.1 million masks. I am relieved to share that, with all the efforts, our villages are safe and not a single COVID-19 case has emerged.

Having started in 1988, Ekal had set a vision to reach 100,000 villages by 2010. When I joined as CEO in 2013, it had reached 52,000 villages. The volunteer force was somewhat demoralised, and many had resigned themselves to accepting the conditions of rural India. I started by consolidating the existing achievements. I focused on improving our quality for a couple of years, and then moved to make a year-wise and region-wise growth plan. Raising resources, both volunteers and funds, was a formidable challenge that I needed to overcome to reach the target. I strengthened the fund mobilizing arms of the movement and the operating arms at ground level to rise to the call of need, and set a new target of 2021 to reach 100k villages. The challenges grew further as we implemented the growth plan, but the immaculate planning, motivated team, and constant monitoring, made it possible to achieve the target by end of 2019, two years ahead of the target date, an achievement that consolidated the movement after it was awarded with the Gandhi Peace Prize, the most prestigious award given to non-profit organizations in India.

Ekal E-Shiksha project is part of Ekal Vidyalaya Foundation of India. The project brings digital literacy to the schools run by the parent organization. 

India is at the forefront of the digital revolution, providing a substantial part of technical expertise and manpower to the world. Within India, the urban centers have garnered most of these opportunities, leaving the majority of the population residing in rural areas largely untouched. To bridge this gap, we must expose rural children to a digital environment. How do we best bring digital infrastructure into a remote village? We have developed an innovative strategy that turns the school into the digital base for the village community. We provide tablets to be used in the school. First, the school teacher, often a local village female, is trained to operate the tablet and guide the students. After the students are taught how to use the tablet, they split into groups of 5 to 8 students and work through activities together. The digital content takes them through the usual curriculum in a more exciting way by using interactive games. These Ekal school tablets are often the first exposure of these communities to the digital world, and the school setting allows us to prepare the next generation in acquiring these important skills. These tablets are essentially a 2-for-1 deal in that they assist the students in learning the curriculum as well as help the students learn how to use technology. An additional value here is that the teacher also becomes technically savvy and can spread the knowledge amongst the villagers.

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Purpose

We want to ensure that every child growing up in a remote rural area is digitally literate. 

Problem Being Addressed 

Rural youth are ill-prepared to enter an economy that is becoming increasingly digital. The lack of digital literacy training at an early age puts the children at a great disadvantage.  

Strategy

We plan to address this problem by providing a digital literacy curriculum at an early age in the primary schools run by Ekal in over 100,000 rural remote villages in India and Nepal. 

Tactics:

We will provide tablets in the schools and teach part of the curriculum via online training materials on the tablets, thus making digital literacy an integral part of the educational experience. 

Target Constituencies 

Our target is the 3 million children enrolled in our Ekal schools that are in remote rural villages. Our schools have a 50-50 presence of girls and boys. The girls are usually even more disadvantaged and thus would be great beneficiaries. 

Outcomes

Short-Term

Our digital literacy intervention is aimed at making the children comfortable with using tablets and understanding a digital framework. The curriculum will also enable them to self-learners, where they can use the content on the tablets to search and explore. Our teachers, who are local youth (mostly women) will also become digitally literate. 

Long Term Outcomes

As the students go on to enter the workforce they will be well prepared to be part of the digital economy they will encounter. Based on previous Ekal projects to provide computer literacy training for rural youth, we have seen that with the training their income goes up almost ten-fold immediately.   

Based on the Digital India report from  McKinsey Global Institute, the impact of the digital economy could be up to 14 Billion in the population we are targeting, and we hope the villagers would be able to fully participate in this opportunity. 

Ultimate Outcome

Citizens living in remote rural villages will be able to participate effectively in the digital economy of the future and utilize its potential to bring themselves out of poverty. 

Each Ekal Vidyalaya school teaches 30 children on average. Oftentimes, we are the only school in the area. There are over 102,000 Ekal schools all over India. Currently our E-Shiksha project has reached 1,200 of these schools, serving about 36,000 students. We plan to reach a total of 2,000 villages within one year, despite the disruptions caused by the pandemic. This would allow us to provide digital education to 60,000 students. Our goal is to expand the E-Shiksha project to 102,000 schools in five years, which would serve 300,000 students.

 The benefits of this project extend past our school students. Our teachers, (who are mostly young women) also receive extensive training in use of the tablets. They become a good resource for the use of digital tools in the village. The family members of the students, about five to six people for each student, would also be exposed through them to the digital world, and also share in the long term benefits.

Ekal Vidyalaya runs 102,000 schools all over India. In the next year we plan to conduct multiple pilot programs to figure out the best mode to implement digital education in the village setting. With the prize money from Elevate, we can initiate pilots in 600 schools. We need to learn how to train the teachers in these village schools, how to manage and update content, and how to assess which content works the best for our students.

These are our goals for the next year. Once we understand these important issues, we will figure how to scale the best practices from the pilots to all our schools. Our goal for the next 5 years is to provide digital education in all of our 102,000 schools, and thus help 3 million children obtain the tools to master digital devices. This will accomplish our two main goals: decreasing the digital divide between urban and rural areas, and improving the quality of our education through uniformity in instruction and assessment. If we accomplish these goals, we will have truly elevated the condition of millions of children as well as their parents and families. I grew up in a small village in India, and through this work my dream and vision of uplifting  villages and villagers and giving them the tools to compete with more digitally privileged people on a somewhat equal footing will be realized. The Elevate prize would literally elevate the digital status of millions of people in rural India. 

Bringing digital literacy to all Ekal villages has several challenges. In the near future our challenges include:

• Existing financial challenges that are exacerbated by the pandemic  

• Lack of internet connectivity in remote areas makes it difficult to upgrade the content in an efficient manner. We hope this problem will be mitigated in the long run. 

• There is  currently a lack of digitally literate people in these remote rural areas, so we will need to invest in bringing trainers from outside and organize training sessions. 

In the next five years:

• Scale: We have ambitious plans to bring digital literacy to 100,000 villages. We will be dealing with different languages all over the country. 

• Financial: Embarking on a major initiative of this nature has financial challenges

• Technical: The rapid pace of changing technology will be a challenge we continue to encounter. Maintaining the hardware at scale will be a challenge we will have to deal with. We hope issues with connectivity will be mitigated in the long run. 

In the short term:

• Financial: We are aggressively seeking funding through grant opportunities and large corporation support. 

• Technical: We are identifying opportunities to work with JIO to bring connectivity to our villages especially in the pilot areas. Currently we have created every tool to work both on and off line. 

• Other: We are looking to create interactive training tutorials for the teachers so that the training is continuous and does not require as much in-person effort. 

In the future:

• Financial: We need approximately $50 Million to bring digital literacy to 100 Million people in 100,000 villages. We will aggressively try to become part of government initiatives that may support such efforts. We will continue to seek grant funding.  

• Scale: At Ekal, everything is planned to be scalable. We are looking into options for content and training videos where we can easily change the language of the content and training

• Technical: We hope to partner with leading companies in the technology sector. Ideally in the future we could look to having some agreement with hardware companies, so that we can constantly keep our hardware current. We want to find content providers who may provide free, up-to-date content. 

We are partnering with IIT Bombay to create a platform that will provide interactive teacher training videos for our schools. We would like to explore using that platform to provide our teachers digital training for E-Shiksha. 

We partnered with the Global Learning X-Prize to get the source code for the winning entry Kit Kit. We translated that application into local languages and we are experimenting with that tool. 

The target populations we serve are tribal and rural communities. As an organization, our goal to empower the local community. Schools were the first intervention. Our school curriculum is extremely comprehensive: in addition to reading, writing, and arithmetic, we also teach health and hygiene, skills, values, and general knowledge. We are now adding E-Shiksha to these offerings. Over 50% of our students are girls.

In the Ekal school model, a village youth is hired and trained to teach. Currently 71% of our Ekal teachers are female. This model ensures a committed and personal teacher for the village school. The local community also holds a stake in the school through a school committee made up of villagers. 

In order to scale up while keeping financial expenses as low as possible, no physical infrastructure is provided. Ekal schools are run in the open: under a tree, on a roof, or in the teacher’s house/hut when it rains. Training and supervision support is provided by whole time volunteers that live in the rural community, most of them being Ekal graduates themselves.  

For our established schools, our low cost model allows us to run them with donations from within the village. We are offering skill training and farmers training. This has allowed the villagers to improve their income and give back to Ekal. Our long term goal is to make all our offerings including E-Shiksha self-supporting.

We will continue to find innovative ways to bring operation costs down. Another arm of our organization works on skill training. That arm is developing products that can be sold to benefit the villagers and also turn some profit for our organization. We hope to reinvest some of those funds back into supporting these kinds of projects. We also hope that in the future, if the skill training brings increased income to the villagers and if the villagers realize the value of digital literacy, we can get them to support the initiative themselves. As and when the government may choose to invest in such an initiative, we will work to align with them.

Thus far the project has been supported through grants from Ekal Vidyalaya Foundation of USA. The 1200 villages have been solely supported through a grant of 600,000 $ from the Ekal USA. We are continuing to seek funds to expand the offerings to 2000 villages.   

We need $ 400,000 to expand our reach to additional 800 villages this year. 

We have planned to raise grants from following sources:

1. Ekal Vidyalaya Foundation of USA

2. Corporations in India under their obligation for Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR).

3. Grants from other Foundations.

The expansion of E-Shiksha into 800 villages will require $400,000. The budget is made to accommodate capital expenditure and recurring operational expenses for three years. 

Approximately 70 % goes into purchasing the hardware. 30  % is allocated for operational expense for three years that includes teacher training, hardward support etc. 

The Elevate Prize can help us in multiple ways. 

1. The grant will help us with financial support, especially as we are challenged due to the pandemic.

2. The visibility we gain from the grant may help us appeal to other granting organizations. 

3. We think bringing digital literacy to 100 million to very marginalized people may be a cause that would appeal to technology companies like Google, Microsoft, Dell, Samsung, Apple etc. We hope the Elevate Prize may enable us to establish partnerships with such companies that can help shape our efforts with the future of work in mind.

4. The Elevate Prize could potentially help connect us to other efforts in the space that we can learn from. 

The need for funding is large. We would like to seek advice on innovative ways to fund this effort. 

We would like to seek help with monitoring and evaluation from experts at institutions like MIT, 

so that we are sure our work is having the appropriate impact. 

We would like to spread the word about our work further so that we can gain more support for this very important cause. Our story is an important one, and we would love to share it with technical magazines like the MIT Tech Review and US mainstream media publications like the New York Times. 

Google: We would like to be part of their education efforts

Khan Academy or other similar online education platforms: We would like to seek partnership to get quality content for our students.

Samsung/Dell/Microsoft/Apple: Partnerships can help us get hardware at subsidized rate or free

MIT - We would like to partner with thought leaders at MIT who can help craft our program so that it can keep the children prepared for the future.