Best e- Gov Project : School Education Dept, Govt of MP : MP State Education Portal

Implementation of the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act

2009 requires the state to provide free elementary education and ensure

compulsory admission, attendance and completion of elementary education by all

children between 6-14 years. They had to ensure availability of neighborhood

schools, ensure that the teachers are not used for non-teaching purposes, that

all schools providing elementary education located even in remote habitations

fulfill the norms and standards of Pupil Teacher Ratio (PTR) and infrastructure.

The govt had to ensure that children belonging to weaker sections or

disadvantaged groups are not discriminated against and prevented from pursuing

and completing elementary education on any grounds.

The inception of RTE Act in 2009 has levied additional expectations on the

state school education departments, to be able to provide transparent and

accountable governance apart from ensuring quality education to the masses.

The major challenges faced by the government of MP in achieving the objective

of the quality education and proactive governance include ensuring enrolment of

over 1.60 crore children, retention and achievement of minimum learning levels,

management and administration of schools, tracking of movement of employees and

timely payments of salaries. They also include managing, coordinating and

synchronizing multiple administrative units under multiple departments,

administrative control of the teachers. Considering the complex scenario and

spread of the activities at habitat level, there were no reliable and integrated

systems to facilitate the functioning in an efficient and integrated manner.

The government in coordination with NIC, Bhopal has come up with an

innovative portal, www.educationportal.mp.gov.in which is being extensively used

to cater to the education, administrative and management needs of a huge number

of schools, children, teachers and administrative staff. This project is a joint

initiative of  State School Department and NIC. Software development and

deployment has been done in-house by NIC.  Considering the importance  of the

project and potential of replicability, NIC has not charged  for  the

development of the software and its deployment in the data center. In most of

the E-Gov projects,government is spending crores of rupees in the procurement of

costly servers, data centers, software liceses and application  software

development,  etc.This project demonstrates, how the two government agencies can

work together and delivery without wasting the precious government funds. The

State Education Portal of Madhya Pradesh is being used to automate, streamline

and reengineer various processes and functions involved in the governance of the

schools, managing the beneficiaries, staff and other entities of the school

education system. The portal totally addresses the needs of students, teachers,

citizens and educational managers in the spirit of the intentions of RTE Act

2009, expectations of RTI Act 2005, objectives of SSA and implementation of

policy of school education. It includes a well integrated suite of e-governance

applications and facilitates a common platform for all school education related

services and a single source of authentic and live information for all

stakeholders and participating departments/ agencies. The portal benefits 1.60

crore students, 1 lakh out of school children, 1 lakh children with special

needs, 2.25 lakh teachers and 1.1 lakh schools from 90,000 remote habitations

have benefited from this initiative by the state govt. Apart from managing the

students and implementing the RTE the portal also acts as an effective mechanism

to manage the teachers salaries and even provide salary slips to them online.

Every user who has been registered on the portal is provided a unique login

through which he can fulfil the tasks delegated to him. The state govt can

monitor even the minutest of details right down to the weekly tests results of

these students. The portal has recorded nearly 30 lakh hits in the last 17

months which speaks volumes for the state govt's efficiency in being able to

deliver the right platform for effective use by the people."There have been

noticable improvements in the state's education quality and the results have

surpassed all records for the past 20 years," says Sunil Jain, Technical

Director, NIC.