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STATE EDUCATION PORTAL GOVERNMENT OF MADHYA PRADESH
DOCUMENTATION OF BEST PRACTICE
May 2012
Researched and Documented by:
OneWorld Foundation India
2
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Executive Summary ....................................................................................................................... 3
Methodology .................................................................................................................................. 3
Background .................................................................................................................................... 4
Objective......................................................................................................................................... 6
Programme Design ........................................................................................................................ 6
Key Stakeholders......................................................................................................................... 7
Process Flow ................................................................................................................................ 8
Institutional arrangements for project management ............................................................ 8
Key priority areas under the project ...................................................................................... 8
Technology employed ........................................................................................................... 12
Financial Resources ................................................................................................................... 12
Impact ........................................................................................................................................... 12
Provision of an appropriate platform for implementation and monitoring of education
services ....................................................................................................................................... 12
Enhancement in transparency in government operations in the education sector .............. 13
Customisation of information and capacity building initiatives to suit needs of individual
(or groups) of staff .................................................................................................................... 13
Making governance proactive .................................................................................................. 14
Participation of stakeholders .................................................................................................... 14
Contribution of the education portal to RTE Act implementation ....................................... 14
Challenges in Implementation .................................................................................................. 15
Inhibiting mindset of the government officials ...................................................................... 15
Large volume of data and number of stakeholders ............................................................... 16
Ill-developed technical capacities of stakeholders ................................................................. 16
Enhancements .............................................................................................................................. 16
Conclusion .................................................................................................................................... 17
References .................................................................................................................................... 17
Appendix A – Interview Questionnaire ................................................................................... 18
3
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
For a country of India’s magnitude and poverty levels, education becomes a critical sector in
terms of its potential to contribute to sustained growth of the people. Despite being home to
the third largest education system globally, India only spends approximately 4 percent of its
total GDP for development of its human resources through education. According to the
provisional data of the 2011 census, the effective literacy rate stands at 74.04 percent in the
country, indicating that much remains to be done in the education sector. This figure does
not even capture the appalling inequalities that exist in access to education, the often poor
quality of education imparted in many rural schools, and the prevalence of a system that
does not focus on learning and child development.
While the national and state governments have initiated various schemes and policies for
betterment of the school education system in the country, these have often met with failures
owing to the size of the beneficiary population and absence of effective monitoring
mechanisms. Madhya Pradesh is the second largest state in the country in terms of
geographical area and the sixth largest in terms of population size. Concomitantly, the
number of children in the age group 6-14 years stands at 1.10 crore and the sector is
managed by nearly 3.5 lac employees. To streamline the functioning of all staff members,
make them aware of recent developments in the sector and assess the performance of each
and every student in the state, the Government of MP and the National Informatics Centre
Bhopal Division introduced the MP State Education Portal in 2008.
The education portal employs technology developed in house to integrate various path-
breaking features like the Learning Enhancement Programme, Financial and Accounts
Management System, Student Benefit Management System, Integrated Human Resource
Management System and such like to provide a sustainable and economical solution to the
challenge of effective implementation as well as monitoring of the school education
policies/schemes in the state.
For its far-reaching impact and voluminous outreach, the project has been awarded various
national and state level recognitions. It was adjudged as one of the Best IT Implementations
of the Year 2010 by PCQuest, awarded the Gold Icon National e-Governance Award of the
Government of India 2009, the Manthan South Asia e-Governance Award 2009, the Award
of Excellence under the CSI Nihilent e-Governance Awards 2008-2009, and the Best IT
Project under IT for Masses Category in the Madhya Pradesh State Government e-
Governance Awards 2008-2009.
METHODOLOGY
School education is a large and crucial sector for development of all states in India. Given
the size of population of Madhya Pradesh, the sector is all the more critical for the state.
During the four years of its operation, the MP state education portal has proven to be a
4
School education in Madhya Pradesh
Geographic reach: More than 1 lac
habitations of the state with
majority lying in remote areas
Beneficiaries: 1.60 crore students
(1.10 crore in government schools)
and their parents
Institutions: 1.17 lac schools; many
located in remote areas of the state
Human resources: 3.5 lac teachers
and staff under 249 categories
Annual budget outlay:
Approximately INR 8,000 crore
Source: Department of School Education,
Government of Madhya Pradesh
sustainable model for implementation and monitoring of various schemes and policies in
the school education sector in Madhya Pradesh.
The Governance Knowledge Centre team identified a set of salient features and benefits
particular to the MP education portal through in-depth desk-based research on the
background, working design and current performance of the project. Based on this research,
the initiative was verified as a best practice in governance through a field visit to Bhopal.
The team interacted with the Secretary of the Department of School Education, Government
of Madhya Pradesh, and the Technical Director of the National Informatics Centre Bhopal
Division. Semi-structured questionnaires were used to conduct interviews with them.
BACKGROUND School education is the largest sector in Madhya
Pradesh in terms of the number of beneficiaries,
institutions, involvement of human resources,
and geographical reach. The current system of
administration for school education, made more
streamlined under the Right to Education,
involves a large number of stakeholders at
various levels.
Teachers under the school education system in
MP are appointed by more than 800 local bodies
and government offices at the level of both rural
and urban local bodies. This makes the task of
governance, administration, management,
monitoring and coordination of such varied and
large number of agencies, institutions, staff,
schools and students increasingly difficult. Multiple activities at various levels of
administration under different departments are difficult to be synchronised if performed in
isolated domains. The need, therefore, was for an integrated platform to bring all
stakeholders together and enable interaction between them.
In order to take care of children’s educational needs in the entire state, it is crucial to have
access to reliable, consistent and updated information on numbers and profile of target
children. The task is complicated at two levels- first, information at the micro level is heavily
inconsistent owing to irregular updation and lack of monitoring of local level records by
higher authorities, and second, children are the target population for a variety of
government schemes, most of which rarely have any inter-linkages for facilitation and
consistency in information. Moreover, the information collected at the village, block, district
5
and state levels was not easily storable in a convenient format, retrievable and available for
an easy analysis.
Timely and accurate transfer of funds to over 1,30,000 agencies that include more than
1,11,000 School Management Committees and 20,000 gram panchayats and local bodies that
manage civil works has traditionally been one of the most significant challenges faced by the
education sector. Untimely payment of salaries also leads to demotivation and inefficiencies
on part of teachers as well as other employees involved. There existed no system for a
planned transfer of funds based on real time data on enrolment of students, teachers
employed, number of classrooms and the funds already transferred.
The passage of the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009 (RTE Act)
has enhanced the role of local level bodies in the school education sector. For the effective
implementation of the Act, it was necessary to innovate an efficient system to monitor the
compliance of the Act’s provisions. Further, the Right to Information Act, 2005 has made it
mandatory for all government officials to disseminate public information, with exclusion of
some information, to any Indian citizen on demanding the same. This has enjoined upon the
government to maintain transparency and accountability in its operations. Information can
only be disseminated when it is regularly maintained and updates in a standardised format.
Civic participation is also enhanced by ready availability of information.
It is in this context that the Department of School Education and the National Informatics
Centre, Madhya Pradesh, developed an integrated, online eGovernance portal
(http://www.educationportal.mp.gov.in/) to enable functioning and monitoring of various
stakeholders in real time. Since 2008, the portal has formed the backbone of the school
education sector in MP.
Figure 1: Screenshot of the Madhya Pradesh school education portal
6
OBJECTIVE
The MP school education portal was developed with the aim of enhancing the performance
of school education sector by facilitating proactive, transparent and accountable governance
to fulfil the mandates of the RTE and RTI Acts, goals of Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan,
commitments of various departments involved, and to create an online integrated portal as a
single destination to address issues of inconsistency and poor coordination in the school
education sector across the state.
PROGRAMME DESIGN
The project was implemented with the aim of bringing together a large number of
stakeholders in the school education sector of the state and in designing a subsystem that
would make it possible for all stakeholders to monitor the compliance of every requirement
of the RTE Act for each and every school in the state. In order to seamlessly amalgamate
these priorities, following components were integrated into the project:
i. Learning Enhancement Programme
ii. Online Village Education Register (VER)
iii. Integrated Enrolment and Retention System
iv. Out Of School Children (OOSC)
v. Children With Special Needs (CWSN)
vi. Schools Management System
vii. Student Benefit Management System
viii. School Inspections Management System
ix. Financial and Accounts Management System
x. Civil Works Management System
xi. SMS-based Communication and Alerting System
xii. Content, Document and Knowledge Management System
xiii. Online Learning Resources for Students
xiv. Integrated Human Resources Management System (i-HRMS)
7
KEY STAKEHOLDERS
Directorate of Public Instruction (DPI)
State level
Department of School Education Rajya Shiksha Kendra (RSK)
Tribal Welfare Department (TWD)
Department of Urban Administration
Department of Panchayat and Rural Development
Field level
About 800Appointing Authorities from rural and urban local bodies
4018 HSS Principals/Drawing and Disbursing Officers (DDOs)
50 District Education Officers, Assistant Commissioners (Tribal Welfare)
50 District Project Coordinators under Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan
45 Principals of District Institutes of Education & Training/District Resource Centres
313 Block Education Officers
322 Block Resource Centre Coordinators
About 11,000 Supervisory Functionaries at various levels of administration
District (50), Block (313), Cluster (3000) and Cluster Academic Centres (about 6300)
Figure 1: Administrative structure of the school education sector in Madhya Pradesh
8
PROCESS FLOW
An online application based, bi-lingual, database driven, dynamic web portal was designed
to facilitate information based online monitoring, analysis and dissemination of live
information in real time. It has been integrated with commonly available SMS technology so
as to connect a large number of teachers, field level functionaries and other stakeholders.
Core banking facilities were utilised for secure and timely transfer of funds and real time
monitoring of fund utilisation.
INSTITUTIONAL ARRANGEMENTS FOR PROJECT MANAGEMENT
Realising that the changing requirements and improvisations within the system would
gradually become pronounced with time, it was necessary for an in-house professional
agency to design and constantly monitor the usage of the portal, the challenges emerging
within it, and introduce improvements from time to time. For this purpose, the National
Informatics Centre was the organisation responsible for conceptualisation and
implementation of the education portal.
Further, it was essential to have all stakeholders in agreement to effectively implement the
education portal. This was ensured by circulation of joint instructions by the Heads of
Department and the Principal Secretaries of concerned departments. The Chief Secretary
also issued instructions in order to ensure cooperation from District Collectors and CEOs of
zila panchayats.
A multi-departmental team was constituted for project management and comprised of the
Commissioner of Rajya Shiksha Kendra, Commissioner of Public Instruction, Commissioner
for Tribal Development, NIC representative at the state level. Also, a project management
team was also constituted at the district level and consisted of the Assistant Commissioner
for Tribal Welfare and Programmer, Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan. Both the teams meet regularly
to assess the performance and address the shortfalls in the system.1
KEY PRIORITY AREAS UNDER THE PROJECT
Certain areas were identified as priority areas requiring immediate attention under the
project.
I. Integrated Human Resources Management System (i-HRMS)
An effective system to manage human resources was considered a key priority that was to
be addressed by the education portal. It is meant to create an online and live database of key
entities of the school education sector and to codify each and every authority involved in the
1 Government of Madhya Pradesh. Department of School Education. ‘Nomination note for PM
Awards for Excellence in Public Administration – 2011’.
9
sector – departments, schools, offices, institutions, DDOs, appointing authorities, Cluster
Academic Coordinators or Jan Shikshaks, and teachers. Further, every employee was mapped
to a school/institution/office in order to immediately identify which of these bodies and the
location where these employees are posted.
Pay bills are generated through the portal to ensure that all employees get timely payment
of their wages. i-HRMS also enables employees to register and get quick redressal of their
grievances. Teachers can also register their training needs on the portal and the concerned
authorities can take immediate action on these. Since it provides a common platform for
employees from all over the state, experience sharing has been facilitated among them for
the first time. Also, e-service books have been created for over 3.3 lac staff members and
teachers under various categories.
Related modules within the i-HRMS include Compassionate Appointment Facilitation and
Monitoring System (CAFMS), Guest Faculty Management System (GFMS), retirement claims
status monitoring, grievance redressal, online counselling, unique identification codes, and
such like.
II. Learning Enhancement Programme
Under the LEP, Madhya Pradesh became the first state in the country to initiate an online
system for monitoring the academic achievement levels of more than 1.10 crore students in
government schools on a monthly basis. The monitoring is done against common standards
for performance assessment and has worked to create accountability of teachers to
performance of students. As a result of this initiative, timely remedial interventions have
Drawing and Disbursing
Officers (DDOs)
School teachers and other
school education sector
employees across Madhya
Pradesh
Schools/educational
institutions/offices across
Madhya Pradesh
Figure 2: Triangular structure used as framework for codification of employees
10
been made possible to enhance learning capacities of children on a need instead of annual
basis.
The LEP section in the education portal houses in depth information on the monthly
performance of students in each government school at the primary, middle, high, and higher
secondary levels within the state. Information is classified under well performing, poor
performing schools, schools where monthly tests have not been conducted, results of
monthly tests and annual tests, district wise ranking on the basis of performance of schools
within the district in monthly tests, details on the absence of students in monthly tests, and
such like. Information is categorised under district, block, school and classroom levels and is
available in the public domain for use by officials, public representatives, parents, media
and society at large.
III. Finance and Accounts Management System
The portal contains details of approximately 1.13 agencies involved in the education sector
in various capacities. All the orders for release of funds can now be generated online
through the portal. Earlier, school teachers were unaware of the details of funds being
transferred to schools and the status of their utilisation. SMS alerts are now sent to teachers
and other account holders to update them of the transfer of funds.
IV. Online Village/Habitation Education Register (VER)
Household and village level surveys are regularly held to identify the exact situation of
children’s education in the state. These surveys capture ground level data on the age and
category wise target population of children habitation wise for enrolment, profile of enrolled
children and out of school children (OOSC) – drop outs, never enrolled, children with
special needs (CWSN) and class wise enrolment. Identification of children under each of
these heads has enabled the government to target its efforts and resources to areas of
priority thus identified. The initiative has resulted in increasing the Net Enrolment Ratio
from 98.70 percent to 99.5 percent between 2009 and 2011.
V. Civil Works Management System
The portal has information on the status of construction of more than 2 lac civil works
undergoing in the education sector in the state. Large number and often distant location of
buildings makes it a cumbersome task to track and monitor the status of these buildings.
The portal has automated the complete life cycle of the civil work including sanction,
registration, monthly progress, revision of technical and financial sanction, inspections,
completion and hand over. Owing to this provision, instant attention can be brought to
building where work has not been started, stalled, progressing inadequately or stopped and
remedial measures be taken within time, preventing wastage of large resources.
11
As per the MP State NIC, despite the huge potential, this system has not proven very
effective since the agencies responsible for construction – gram panchayats and Urban Local
Bodies – are not within the jurisdiction of the State Education Department.
VI. Online registration and tracking of assistance to Children with Special Needs
(CWSN)
A large number of children in India are excluded from the formal education system owing
to their physical disabilities. Such children’s educational needs are also to be met by the
government as a matter of their right. In MP, more than 1 lac CWSN have been identified
and registered on the portal. Accordingly, need based assistance provided to them by the
state has been greatly regularised.
MP has become the first Indian state to use information and communication technology to
track children with special needs and integrate them within the education system, on such
large scale. For the first time, need based interventions like Braille books, mobility allowance
and such like are being provided to CWSN and personalised follow up is done to ensure the
services have reached each and every child directly through the School Management
Committees (SMCs). The intervention has helped in improving the absorptive capacity of
expenditure on the CWSN from INR 600 per CWSN to INR 2600 per CWSN.2
VII. Online registration and mainstreaming of Out of School Children (OOSC)
The education facilitates the automation of various processes involved in the identification
of out of school children, their registration and follow up done through residential bridge
courses, human development centres, platform schools, ashrams, KGBV hostels, migratory
hostels and such like. The portal also has provisions for citizens to report online any OOSC
and audit the follow up action being taken by the department for mainstreaming and
enrolment. So far, the number of OOSC has come down from over 2.31 lac to 70,000 within a
period of three years.
VIII. Online tracking of school inspections and their follow up
Monitoring of 1.10 lac schools in a state as large as MP is a challenging task. More than
50,000 school inspections are being carried out by designated officers every month. The
education portal has ensured regular and meaningful inspection and improved governance
in schools. All inspection reports and details of follow up /corrective action taken by the
concerned authorities is available in the public domain for facilitation of social audits and
for putting a check on instances of fake inspection.
IX. Online Students Benefits Management System
2 Department of School Education, Government of Madhya Pradesh. 2011.
12
The education portal has built in features for implementing and monitoring the
disbursement of benefits under various scholarships and benefits schemes. These include
scholarships for students belonging to the SC, ST, OBC and minority communities, Balika
Shiksha Protsahan Yojana (BSPY), INSPIRE Awards and such like. The impact of this system
has been manifold – more than 70,000 students in MP have received INSPIRE Awards of
DST/MHRD, Government of India, which is more than 30 percent of the total number of
INSPIRE Awards distributed throughout the country. Owing to availability of information
on the basis of school, class and categories on the portal, disbursal of benefits like free
textbooks, uniforms, cycles has become effective and efficient.
TECHNOLOGY EMPLOYED
SMS technology has been used to send alerts to concerned authorities and teachers at the
time of an event or in the event of non performance of a duty.
FINANCIAL RESOURCES
The annual budget for the management of education sector in MP is nearly INR 8,000 crores.
IMPACT
PROVISION OF AN APPROPRIATE PLATFORM FOR IMPLEMENTATION AND MONITORING OF
EDUCATION SERVICES
Considering the diversity of stakeholders involved in the school education sector and the
scale of the sector’s expanse, an online platform has proven to be the most appropriate
forum for coordinating various activities at different administrative levels. The web portal
has worked to complement previously existing system for implementation and monitoring
of government interventions in school education sector in MP. It has provided a more
coherent information management platform that provides a seamless user experience for the
staff members.
Name of software Type of software Use of software
Microsoft.NET Framework
4.0 using ASP.NET and C#
Freeware Development of front end of
the portal
JQUERY Open source -Java script framework
-Development of front end
SQL Server 2008 Proprietary Maintenance of data base in
the back end
PostgreSQL 9.0 Open source Development of back end of
the portal
Microsoft SQL Server
Reporting Services
Proprietary Reporting and analysis tool
13
A single point of access to all information regarding school education sector in MP has been
provided by the portal. Owing to the number of stakeholders involved, aggregation of all
information in one place was a humungous task. However, the education portal has
effectively combined various technologies and information systems to create a single
location access point for day to day operations and monitoring of the sector.
ENHANCEMENT IN TRANSPARENCY IN GOVERNMENT OPERATIONS IN THE EDUCATION
SECTOR
School education is a large and complex sector owing to the number of stakeholders
involved in it. The problem of implementing and monitoring various government schemes
in this sector is further magnified in a state as large as MP. Under the previous system,
government office orders were not available for public viewing in one consolidated format
and location. Swift online dissemination now takes place of government office orders related
to school education at different levels by different departments, information related to
governance, and key processes and entities to common public. This has resulted in enhanced
opportunities for public scrutiny, oversight and social audit of government functioning.
Complete and updated reports about various aspects of school education in the state are
available on the education portal. These have often been utilised by the media for
highlighting deficiencies as well as success stories.
CUSTOMISATION OF INFORMATION AND CAPACITY BUILDING INITIATIVES TO SUIT NEEDS
OF INDIVIDUAL (OR GROUPS) OF STAFF
The education portal carries personalised information for every staff member. With the help
of the iHRMS, details of every staff member in the school education sector across the state
have been fed into the system. Each of them has a unique log in id to access all relevant
information in one place. In a government setting, owing to the large amount of data and
information that needs to be disbursed among staff members, it is increasingly difficult to
make targeted information available to the appropriate authorities and beneficiaries.
Therefore, a portal provides the facility to filter information and tools to target identified
user groups or roles. For instance, teachers from a particular village would only have access
to information relating to schools within that village and to that regarding general
awareness for all. The objective of this is to deliver a tailored environment to staff that
contains only the information they need to do their job, presented in a way that suits their
needs in the best manner.3
The capacity building modules for the teachers have been developed in a manner so as to
enable to utilise that training for carrying out computer related tasks with ease in their daily
3 Atlantis Web Fitters. Web. 12 June. 2012.
<http://www.atlanticwebfitters.ca/WhitePapers/PrescientDigitalExpertise/Portalvsportal/tabid/148/lan
guage/en-US/Default.aspx/>.
14
lives. Many of those skills are not required for direct fulfilment of their duties in official
capacity but have provided them a sense of dignity and ability to conduct tasks for which
they earlier required assistance.
MAKING GOVERNANCE PROACTIVE
The information available on the school education portal is being utilised by various
stakeholders and media to forecast problems and issues at initial stages and enabling the
department in undertaking timely corrective action. The portal constantly works to make
more relevant and updated information available online, thereby ensuring that governance
is made more accountable and transparent in its functioning. For instance, reports that are
made available on the portal for public viewing include lists of teachers that are likely to be
involved in non-teaching functions, list of schools showing poor academic performance in
monthly tests, list of habitations not having a school, list of OOSC/CWSN that have not been
followed up for mainstreaming, SMS based automated alerts for concerned authorities and
such like.
The objective is to inculcate in government functionaries a spirit of making information
available to the public even before it has been asked for.
PARTICIPATION OF STAKEHOLDERS
The education portal has overtime become a robust managerial tool that has already
received more than 1.31 crore user hits. This reflects the extensive use of the portal. Figure 3
provides an overview of the usage of the portal since July 2010 to May 2012.
CONTRIBUTION OF THE EDUCATION PORTAL TO RTE ACT IMPLEMENTATION
Madhya Pradesh is the first Indian state to establish an online workflow system for effective
implementation and monitoring of the RTE Act 2009. The online system has the capacity to
generate almost real time reports on the existing gaps and inconsistencies in RTE
implementation and adherence to the Act in the state. For instance, it can inform of school
Figure 3: Number of total user hits on the portal, July 2010-May 2012
Source: Google Analytics
15
wise gaps that exist between infrastructural facilities provided by schools as per DISE data
as well as teachers’ deployment and enrolment from the education portal in and the norms
and standards prescribed for the same under the RTE Act 2009.
The Act requires that teachers are not involved in non-teaching activities and only be
teaching at their designated places of posting. The portal facilitates merging of information
collected for different purposes – the list of posting of teachers through HRMS and teacher
wise monthly test report – to generate a consolidated list of teachers drawing salary from a
particular school but not teaching in that school.
Further, RTE requires states to ensure that all children between 6 and 14 years of age attend
school regularly. The education portal generates class and school wise information on the
enrolment and number of children that appeared in the monthly tests. This gives a clear
indication as to whether students are attending school regularly and helps identify low
attendance and drop out trends on a rolling basis. Because of this intervention, the number
of out of school children has reduced from approximately 2.31 lac to 70,000 in three years’
time.
Quality of education delivered is also monitored regularly through the Learning
Enhancement Programme.
The education portal contains an online analysis of household education survey data. It
indicates those habitations within the state where children are unable to enrol in school
education owing to unavailability of schools in their neighbourhood. It also generates lists of
habitations where more than one school of the same type is situated. This has helped in
rationalising the establishment of schools in various habitations and ensuring that children
in un- and under-served areas gain access to education in an equitable manner. More than
1,000 such institutions have been rationalised in the last three years.
MP is also the first state in the country to initiate an online system for granting recognition
to non government schools under the RTE Act. Authorities of such schools can track the
status of their applications online and download the recognition certificate online too. This
has minimised delays in the process of grating recognition and enhanced transparency in
procedures.
CHALLENGES IN IMPLEMENTATION
INHIBITING MINDSET OF THE GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS
Most of the government officials in MP do not have adequate training in using technology
tools. The IT divisions in most of the state government departments, therefore, enjoy
monopoly over methods used to flow information from one authority to another. With the
advent of the education portal and concomitant efforts made by NIC to gather information
16
from relevant departments, a major challenge faced was the thwarting of NIC’s efforts by
the IT divisions of these departments. In many instances, as observed in the interaction with
NIC Bhopal Division, incorrect and incomplete information was furnished to NIC by these
more localised IT divisions for aggregation into the portal. This resulted in replication of
efforts and resources since the NIC had to individually assess the correctness of all
information and data submitted to them.
LARGE VOLUME OF DATA AND NUMBER OF STAKEHOLDERS
The education portal is highly relevant due to its integration of a large number of
stakeholders and information in one location. However, to uniquely identify and code each
of the 3.5 lacs staff members was one of the most significant challenges faced during the
initial phases of the project. However, this was resolved by mapping employees with DDOs
and various kinds of educational institutions to create a link between all three. By linking
teachers to DDOs and schools at the same time, the portal automatically reflects if the
teacher is performing on-teaching functions as well. This is done by assessing the
performance reports generated on the basis of monthly reports and analysing this report in
conjunction with the salary drawn through the DDOs. If a teacher is procuring salary
regularly and the performance of her students is consistently poor, it reflects that he/she is
involved in non-teaching functions during the official working hours.
ILL-DEVELOPED TECHNICAL CAPACITIES OF STAKEHOLDERS
As is adequately reflected by the two challenges mentioned so far, presence of a large
number of technically challenged stakeholders was an obvious hurdle in effective
functioning of the project. To resolve this situation, NIC organised workshops and training
sessions upto the grassroots level to make the stakeholders aware of the use and methods of
operation of the education portal.
ENHANCEMENTS
The Government of MP and NIC have planned the introduction of a handheld device into
the project for collection of data from the grassroots. The frontend of the application would
is based on Android (an open source software) while the back end is developed on SQLite
(open source) software. The devices are GPS enabled. Pilots are already underway in
Hoshangabad, Dewas and Tikagarh districts of MP. Profiles of schools are being captured
through the handheld device by taking photographs and feeding in their geographical
location. There is an inbuilt application in the device t monitor the progress of civil works at
school sites.
The NIC Bhopal Division has already been contacted by various states in the country for
help in development of a similar portal to implement and monitor various schemes. These
17
states include Uttarakhand, Chhattisgarh and the Union Territory of Pondicherry. The
Department of Home Affairs, Government of India, has also proposed collaboration.
CONCLUSION
The MP state education portal has revolutionised the implementation and monitoring of
various school education related schemes in the state. Owing to the introduction of this
portal, Madhya Pradesh has pioneered the implementation of the provision for 25 percent
reservation for poor children in private schools across the state and has set up an efficient
system for reimbursement of costs accrued to private schools for this. Distribution of various
benefits like textbooks, uniforms and such like to students has also been regularised. As a
result, MP figures amongst the top performers for implementation of the RTE Act in the
country. It has effectively combined technology and human resources to complement rather
than replace the existing mechanisms for implementation and monitoring of various
schemes in the school education sector in MP.
Research was carried out by the OneWorld Foundation India (OWFI), Governance Knowledge Centre (GKC) team.
Documentation was created by Knowledge and Research Manager, Aditi Dayal
For further information, please contact Rajiv Tikoo, Director, OWFI.
REFERENCES
Government of Madhya Pradesh. Department of School Education. ‘Nomination note for
PM Awards for Excellence in Public Administration – 2011’.
Government of Madhya Pradesh. Department of School Education. Web. May 2012. <
http://www.educationportal.mp.gov.in/>.
18
APPENDIX A – INTERVIEW QUESTIONNAIRE
Department of School Education, Government of MP
Background
1. When was the education portal launched?
2. Who are the primary stakeholders in the project? What are their roles and
responsibilities?
3. Was a pilot experiment conducted to gauge the portal’s impact on a small scale prior
to its launch?
Implementation strategy
Project components
4. What are the primary ICT components of the project?
5. What are the unique features of the project?
6. What infrastructure and human resources are utilised for the portal?
7. How was the information on schools, teachers, and students all across the state
collected and synced with the portal?
8. What training was provided to portal managers and other stakeholders involved in
managing technical aspects of the portal?
9. How is the portal managed at different levels of administration?
10. Considering the low penetration of internet connectivity in MP, why do you think a
web portal is the best alternative for creating a common platform for all stakeholders
in RTE to interact? Were any other alternatives explored?
Funding
11. How is the project funded?
12. What was the cost of development of the portal?
13. What are the daily operational costs of the portal? Please give a breakdown of the
major heads of expenditure.
14. How can it be ensured that the project is financially sustainable?
Monitoring
15. How is regular updation of the portal ensured?
16. How is the authenticity of data checked?
17. Is any database maintained of the profiles of users accessing the portal from various
regions of the state? If yes, how is this data utilised to gauge the usage of the portal?
Impact
Achievements
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18. What have been the most significant achievements of project?
19. Which components of the project have shown most and least success?
20. Can you provide data on the following:
i. Total number of teachers covered under the project
ii. Total number of students reached
iii. Total number of schools covered?
Challenges
21. What have been the major challenges to the project so far? How have/are these being
overcome?
i. In particular, how was the contradiction between low literacy in MP and the
use of a web portal overcome?
ii. Given the low level of internet connectivity in the state, how was this
challenge overcome?
Enhancements
22. What enhancements have been planned for the future?