STATE EDUCATION PORTAL GOVERNMENT OF MADHYA PRADESH

DOCUMENTATION OF BEST PRACTICE

May 2012

Researched and Documented by:

OneWorld Foundation India

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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)

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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

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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’.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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/>.

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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

19

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?