Every School will have an IT Teacher – You just cant stop Sibal, Can you ?

Now here is another announcement by Mr. Kapil Sibal –

“We have now a policy. All schools will have an ICT (Information and Communications Technology) teacher. We will pay their salary, which is Rs.10,000 per month”

I don’t think any other HRD minister has made such significant announcements in education so regular basis, We have had atleast 5 articles in past couple of months talking about initiatives taken by Sibal !

Coming back to this initiative – I must say it is really great, but bringing this to reality seems to be nearly impossible. Think about this – We have over a million primary / secondary Schools in India (this is a very rough estimate based on what I found from various Internet sources) and current scenario is such that many don’t even have classrooms ! And more than half of them do not have even have proper basic facilities needed for a school.

Mr. Sibal says that he is going to pay a salary of 10k, Imagine even if half of the schools recruit such teacher, the cost of that would itself would be roughly 500 crores (have I got the maths right :))

I don’t want to take away anything from the these noble education initiatives that have been announced over past few months - what I am trying to dig into is, how many such initiatives can actually come into reality. Offcourse, I am doing this analysis from Birds eye view, but even then they look very difficult to achieve, especially in a country like India where even simple things are very difficult to achieve !

What say people? Do you really think this is possible ?