FOSS meeting with Secretary, School Education, Government of Maharashtra

After Kerala its time for another Indian state to enter FOSS world. Soon the whole India will accept it and our country will be free again, this time it will be from proprietary softwares.

A delegation of seven educationists and activists from Mumbai met the Secretary, School Education, Government of  Maharashtra, Shri Sanjay Kumar, at the Mantralaya on 2nd September at 3pm. Their aim was to express their critique of the proposed agreement between the state and a multinational corporation in the area of ICTs in education and to offer an alternative based of Free and Open Source Software.

The attached representation (PDF) was submitted to him by the group, who consisted of :

Nagarjuna G., Free Software Foundation, India
Padma Sarangapani, Tata Institute of Social Sciences
Ravi Subramaniam, Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education, TIFR
J T de Souza GNU/Linux Users Group, Mumbai
Chandita Mukherjee, Comet Media Foundation
Sridhar Iyer, IIT Bombay and
Sahana Murthy, IIT Bombay.

During the meeting, the Secretary informed the delegation that the State government is aware of the pitfalls of working with corporates and is willing to consider alternatives approaches to introducing ICTs in education on a large scale, if any group proposes them. The Govt, he said, will work with all interested parties and will be inclusive in their approach.

When told that in the current Maharashtra standard 8 text book, for example, there are brand names mentioned in the text and logos shown in the illustrations, he said that their department does not interfere with textbook content, since that is looked after by the experts of the Maharastra Text Book Bureau. When we suggested that it was the Education Department’s role to set policy guidelines, such as not to carry brand names, the Secretary agreed with this in in principle.

We suggested that we can help in
(i) designing a curriculum for students that focusses on broad concepts from ICT that help develop thinking skills, as well as specific usage skills,
(ii) writing books that can implement this curriculum, in a vendor-neutral manner,
(iii) designing curriculum for teachers and
(iv) implementing teacher training programmes

After listening to the delegation, the Secretary asked us to submit a proposal to contribute to the effective dissemination of ICT kills within the school system in Maharashtra . The team agreed to do this within two weeks and to subsequently explore possibilities of reaching an MoU with the Government of Maharashtra. We will keep you posted as the story develops.

—
Dr. Nagarjuna G.
Chairperson, Free Software Foundation of India,
Reader, Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education,
Tata Institute of Fundamental Research,
V.N. Purav Marg, Mankhurd. Mumbai India, 400088

Link to attached PDF :
http://lists.fosscom.in/pipermail/network-fosscom.in/attachments/20090902/4a95c854/attachment.pdf