Soon, you may need another TV for studies
TEAM HERALD
NEW DELHI: If you already have one TV set at home, you may need another soon, not for entertainment but to hook on to 50 education channels being launched from May 1.
You can do with just one TV set, but you will then have to forgo entertainment and news channels as it will have to be hooked on to a special dish antenna to access the education channels. You have to pay just Rs 1500 at the time of admission for distance education to get this dish antenna.
The Human Resources Development Ministry has been working on the project for long and now it has got two GSAT-8 transponders from the Indian Space Research Organisation to get cracking. IIT Madras has been engaged to set up studios and uplink and downlink facilities.
The upcoming channels could have been launched much earlier but for the Information and Broadcasting Ministry refusing to give a NoC on the ground that the NoC is given to companies to start channels and the HRD Ministry is not a company. Only after an intervention of the Prime Minister’s Office, the HRD Ministry got an exemption for the NoC.
From management to mechanical engineering, literature to law and commerce to communication will be available under the project. Each channel will be dedicated to a specific subject to deliver lectures to students who want to pursue higher studies from home, with no age limit to take up this distance education facility.
After each lecture beamed into your home, you can interact with the teacher for 20 minutes through SMS, phone-in and email while the lectures will be also available on the portals for those missing some due to busy with other work during the telecast.
The channels will directly telecast the lectures for eight hours and repeat them over the next 16 hours and then be available on the government’s education website ‘Sakshat.’
Those delivering the lectures directly telecast to you will be professors from IITs, IIMs, NITs, central universities and other top institutions where admissions are too difficult to get. These faculties will be available to students who otherwise keep trying to get the admission year after year.
The idea is to fill in the gap in the quality higher education that most students in India are deprived of for many reasons like getting into early employment as bread-earner of family or admission not available in the colleges in the vicinity.
At present, there are four education channels for higher studies that are beamed through DTH (Direct to Home) — Eklavya, Gyanadarshan-1, Gyanadarshan-2 and Vyas.
At any time, there are some two crore students in India pursuing the higher studies, 12 per cent of who enroll in the distance learning courses while 50 per cent study in the non-accredited institutions.
The ministry sources say since the 50 new channels will be dedicated to specific subjects, the government expects the number of viewers is expected to go up significantly from the category of those getting substandard education in the non-accredited institutions.
