Ms. Bhagya Rangachar

She mainly works with the state board curricular and it is a support system which they are creating and distance education by connecting urban teachers from their centre to the rural school. Although she extensively uses technology for her work now, there was little of it during her formative years. She sees her father as the person who is inspired her to explore what's beyond, she believes that was what tech was to her about the extension of that desire to do this.
She actually started with a small program for the Government school called the midday meal which I may say we were the first to come up with that program. The scale was always small because they were a non-profit. And in 2000 they started integrating ICT tools, but those days ICT tools was still a new buzz-word especially for Government schools and every penny they had was put into getting that software for the next 5 yrs. They claim they don't fuss about curricular – they get them excited about learning technology and many, many girls and boys have been able to get into the professional degrees and are on college scholarships funds. Being a non-profit, cost is also a concern. They set up two criteria – cost effectiveness, i.e. cut down the frills e.g. graphic designing, but definitely pedagogy had to be central and focused. It had to be localised for the village children because it was initially made available for high end private schools children. Thus as a grass-roots initiative that enabled them take technology to 100 rural schools. They even picked up four awards for their learning model.

Sound Bites

• What we did have was a father who was a teacher who connected with the outside world through books. We had a library of books from Tolstoy to Dostoevsky to Albert Tame. He imbibed this love for us to connect to the outside world and that spark to explore and experiment and to innovate. So with my own children too, if you don’t have the spark, it doesn’t matter what infrastructure you create around them, if those two don’t connect… I think that’s what tech was to me it was about the extension of that desire to do this.

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