Tag: education

Reaching for the… sky?

This article, as written by me, appeared in The Hindu on December 4, 2012.

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The Aakash initiative of the Indian government is an attempt to bolster the academic experience of students in the country by equipping them with purpose-built tablets at subsidised rates.

The Aakash 2 tablet was unveiled on November 11, 2012. It is the third iteration of a product first unveiled in October, 2011, and is designed and licensed by a British-Canadian-Indian company named DataWind, headed by chief executive Suneet Singh Tuli.

On November 29, the tablet received an endorsement from the United Nations, where it was presented to Secretary-General Ban-ki Moon by India’s ambassador to the UN, Hardeep Singh Puri, and Tuli.

DataWind will sell Aakash 2 to the government at Rs. 2,263, which will then be subsidised to students at Rs. 1,130. However, the question is this: is it value for money even at this low price?

When it first entered the market, Aakash was censured for being underpowered, underperforming, and just generally cheap. Version one was a flop. The subsequently upgraded successor, released April, 2012, was released commercially before it was remodelled into the Aakash 2 to suit the government’s subsidised rate. As a result, some critical features were substituted with some others whose benefits are either redundant or unnecessary.

Aakash 2 is more durable and slimmer than Aakash, even though both weigh 350 grams. If Akash is going to act as a substitute for textbooks, that would be a load off children’s schoolbags.

But the Ministry of Human Resource Development is yet to reveal if digitised textbooks in local languages or any rich, interactive content have been developed to be served specifically through Aakash 2. The 2 GB of storage space, if not expanded to a possible 32 GB, is likely to restrict the quantity of content further, whereas the quality will be restrained by the low 512 MB of RAM.

The new look has been achieved by substituting two USB ports that the first Aakash had for one mini-USB port. This means no internet dongles.

That is a big drawback, considering Aakash 2 can access only Wi-Fi networks. It does support tethering capability that lets it act as a local Wi-Fi hotspot. But not being able to access cellular networks like 3G, such as in rural areas where mobile phone penetration is miles ahead of internet penetration, will place the onus on local governments to lay internet-cables, bring down broadband prices, etc.

If the device is being envisaged mainly as a device on which students may take notes, then Aakash 2 could pass muster. But even here, the mini-USB port rules out plugging in an external keyboard for ease of typing.

Next, Aakash 2’s battery life is a meagre 4 hours, which is well short of a full college day, and prevents serious student use. Video-conferencing, with a front-facing low-resolution camera, will only drain the battery faster. Compensatory ancillary infrastructure can only render the experience more cumbersome.

In terms of software, after the operating system was recently upgraded in Aakash 2, the device is almost twice as fast and multi-tasks without overheating. But DataWind has quoted “insufficient processing power” as the reason the tablet will not have access to Android’s digital marketplace. Perhaps in an attempt to not entirely short-change students, access to the much less prolific GetJar apps directory is being provided.

Effectively, with limited apps, no 3G, a weak battery and a mini-USB port, the success of the tablet and its contribution to Indian education seems to be hinged solely on its low price.

As always, a problem of scale could exacerbate Aakash 2’s deficiencies. Consider the South American initiative of the One Laptop Per Child program instituted in 2005. Peru, in particular, distributed 8.5 lakh laptops at a cost of US $225 million in order to enhance its dismal education system.

No appreciable gains in terms of test scores were recorded, however. Only 13 per cent of twelve-year olds were at the required level in mathematics and 30 per cent at the required reading level, the country’s education ministry reported in March 2012.

However, Uruguay, its smaller continent-mate, saw rapid transformations after it equipped every primary-school student in the country with a laptop.

The difference, as Sandro Marcone, a Peruvian ministry official, conceded, lay in Uruguayan students using laptops to access interactive content from the web to become faster learners than their teachers, and forming closely knit learning communities that then expanded.

Therefore, what India shouldn’t do is subsidise a tablet that could turn out to be a very costly notebook. Yes, the price is low, but given the goal of ultimately unifying 58.6 lakh students across 25,000 colleges and 400 universities, Aakash 2 could be revised to better leverage existing infrastructure instead of necessitating more.

A dilemma of the auto-didact

If publishers could never imagine that there are people who could teach themselves particle physics, why conceive cheaper preliminary textbooks and ridiculously expensive advanced textbooks? Learning vector physics for classical mechanics costs Rs. 245 while progressing then to analytical mechanics involves an incurrence of Rs. 4,520. Does the cost barrier exist because the knowledge is more specialized? If this is the case, then such books should have become cheaper over time. They have not: Analytical Mechanics, which a good friend recommended, has stayed in the vicinity of $75 for the last three years (now, it’s $78.67 for the original paperback and $43 for a used one). This is just a handy example. There are a host of textbooks that detail concepts in advanced physics and cost a fortune: all you have to do is look for those that contain “hadron”, “accelerator”, “QCD”, etc., in their titles.

Getting to a place in time where a student is capable of understanding these subjects is cheap. In other words, the cost of aspirations is low while the price of execution is prohibitive.

Sure, alternatives exist, such as libraries and university archives. However, that misses the point: it seems the costs of the books are higher to prevent their ubiquitous consumption. No other reason seems evident, although I am loth to reach this conclusion. If you, the publisher, want me to read such books only in universities, then you are effectively requiring me to either abstain from reading these books irrespective of my interests if my professional interests reside elsewhere or depend on universities and university-publisher relationships for my progress in advanced physics, not myself. The resulting gap between the layman and the specialist eventually evades spanning, leading to ridiculous results such as not understanding the “God” in “God particle” to questioning the necessity of the LHC without quite understanding what it does and how that helps mankind.

Fizzed-out futures

Initiatives are arising to plug holes in the Indian education system, or so they claim. Many are ambitious, some even overreaching, but they also exist in the company of those that are honest. However, the cause for concern is that such projects are being viewed as extracurricular to the prevailing education system-even by those who have founded the initiatives. Thoughtful engagement is sought after, an awareness of the “outside world”–a summation of the realities extraneous to the student’s chosen field–is deemed lacking and designated a goal.

Most such initiatives are by students, or recent graduates, and with them, they carry fresh memories of incomplete lessons and half-mentored theses. As their activities grow in scope–which they surely do–there is an attrition between a tendency to remain experimentalist and the certainty provided by going commercial through installing a secure source of support and a fundamental incentive. The last is necessary even though many students remain in denial of it: one man’s idea cannot be shared with the same intensity throughout unless there is a need to depend on it. Money, many fail to realize, maintains currency, too.

The prevalent belief is that the Indian way of learning sidelines the humanities: if a job doesn’t fetch a fat cheque, it concludes there is no point in studying for it. Unfortunately, however, such a view also degrades the pros of technical learning. Subsequently, the responses are disappointingly reactionary. If a student has found it difficult to inculcate a skill, he simply participates in the overarching institution of frustration and dissatisfaction, and assumes the problem is faced by everyone. That is never true, has never been. However, it finds enough purchase to surface as fixes.

In many parts of the country, young graduates and final-year students gather in small rooms on terraces and in garages. For the most part, they discuss the different activities they could perform to compensate for what they think they ought to have learned in the classroom but didn’t. They quickly conclude that original thought is missing-which is very true-and proceed to talk about what they’d need to inculcate it. These are, obviously, surface-level problems. As time passes, the incentive to meet each subsequent week and debate and act or whatever peters out. Essentially, such students’ and graduates’ concerns have been for the short-term.

The long-term concern, it seems, can be addressed more effectively at the individual level than at the systemic level. The institution can encourage extracurricular tasks, point at the dearth of invention and abundance of innovation, and build up an army of youngsters to fix the nation’s most pressing problems. However, the only solution that can pluck India out of this moshpit of unoriginality is to do what is required of all youngsters no matter where they are these days: ideate. Ideas, whether original or otherwise, are necessary; even better when they are distilled out from a knowledge pool that is vast.

Whatever the most dollar-guzzling problems are, the ones that are solved by continuous ideation are what will keep the machine from descending into a standstill. May the humanities be sidelined, may the rote-learner be celebrated, may technical learning signify the staple diet that deprives most Indian students’ of the indulgence of the arts-we are not in need of a paradigm shift to rectify matters. What we need most is to build ourselves to achieve even in the absence of expectations. What we need most is to transcend our cubicles and classrooms and disintegrate the institutionalized frustration. By not doing so, we are letting our communal objectives be defined by a chance mistake.