AISECT Uses ICT to Transform Rural and Semi-Urban India

Leverages ICT to transform lives of 16 lakh rural population and generated over 12,000 rural entrepreneurs.

Ever since its inception in 1985, AISECT has been actively working with an objective to reach out to the remotest corners of India and promote ICT-based education, training, skills and services to empower people, generate employment for the youth and unfold entrepreneurship based initiatives to create an inclusive society. The genesis of the AISECT group has been to utilize ICT to promote social progress in a sustainable way.

AISECT is India’s leading ICT and skills based education, training, services and e-governance network with a spread of over 13,000 centres across 27 states and 3 union territories. The organization has a strong presence at the small towns, districts, blocks and panchayat levels and its initiatives are targeted towards all categories of people from the community – school students, graduate program students, office goers and job holders, working women, housewives, Below Poverty Line Youth, Panchayati Raj Institutions, Parent Teacher Associations and Government Departments.

While the untapped economic potential and collective size of the rural and semi-urban market is huge, it is highly fragmented and decentralized. In areas where the population size is small, the potential number of clientele for a single particular good or service is also limited.

The Implementation

The organization has used IT as a tool to reach out to the remotest corners of the country and facilitate the empowerment of semi-urban and rural populace. The organization has used information communication technology in providing basic computer education and skills training to the students of semi-urban and rural India. AISECT Centres provide access to information window for the rural community at large.

The project uses various softwares such as Eduvantage PRO, RojgarMantra which are all developed and implemented in-house. The organization has mounted various technology based G2C services such as Birth Certificate, Land Records, Aadhar Card Registration, etc. on its existing model. To further empower a greater number of students with anywhere, anytime access to quality education, it introduced its portal ‘aisectonline.com’, thereby fostering a collaborative and interactive approach to learning. It also assisted the trained youth in placement by launching a rural job portal ‘rojgarmantra.com’ and developed the Eduvantage PRO Interactive Multimedia Content to bring in a low cost, high quality multimedia classroom solution for the K-12 school students at the small town, district and block levels.

Challenges

•   Lack of Power & Connectivity: Rural areas are typically characterized by the lack of continuous power supply and connectivity which was a hurdle for the IT based programs. The organization overcame this hurdle by switching to a flexible schedule of centres’ timings. In some cases, solar power was tried. The availability of laptops and mobiles has considerably eased this situation.

•   Language Barrier: Since most of the books were available in English, Mr. Choubey (Founder and Chairman, AISECT) and his peers set themselves the task of coming up with good Hindi content. AISECT became a pioneer in it and developed over 100 modules on Computer Science for students of all ages in Hindi. AISECT also developed the course material in various regional languages which helped in the scalability of the model across centres.

•   Poor awareness: IT Yatra was an innovative tool that was used to reach out to the grassroots.

Apart from that, the organization didn’t have adequate funds for marketing and training. It had to rely on word of mouth, referrals and direct contact to open centres. For a long time AISECT was unable to fund trainers who could go and train 25,000 faculty members across 13,000 centres. It overcame this challenge by investing in a studio at its Headquarters. This studio created audio visual content which was put onto CDs and dispatched to the entrepreneurs for them to train faculty through the AV content. Through effective use of ICT, AISECT has been able to now improve standards and quality of delivery across its centres.

The Impact

AISECT has grown and diversified into various verticals, focusing on education, employment, empowerment, financial inclusion and services dissemination in the semi-urban and rural areas of the country.

Till date, AISECT has transformed the lives of over 16 lakh rural population and generated over 12,000 rural entrepreneurs in the country.

Government services such as Birth Certificate, Land Records, Aadhar Card Registration, Jan Sunwai Kendra, Farmer Registration, PFRDA, MP Online, National Population Register, MNREGA, PAN Card, Suvidhaa Online etc which were out of reach for the villagers, are now easily available through the utilization of internet based facilities. It also set up biometric machines to facilitate UID enrolment for Aadhar based services to the rural populace. It also -

•   Pioneered development of IT content in Hindi and other regional languaged

•   Designed first ever IT Yatra in India to initiate ICT awareness and generate curiosity in schools and colleges

•   Launched ‘aisectonline.com’that empowers students with anywhere, anytime access to education

•   Assists the trained youth in placement by launching a rural job portal ‘rojgarmantra.com’which is focusing on fulfilling the entry level job requirements of private and public sector enterprises at the small town, district and block levels

•   Provides digital literacy programme under various projects like Indira Suchana Shakti Yojana programme, AISECT-Intel partnership, E-Vidya project

•   Launched EduvantagePROas a low cost, high quality interactive multimedia classroom solution for K-12 school students at the small town, district and block levels.

This is but the start of the revolution and such efforts shall truly impact the lives of many people all across the length and breadth of India.