Just one day after it formally launched its operations in India, the United Nations-funded Global e-Schools and Communities Initiative (GeSI) joined hands with the Indian state Rajasthan in an ambitious project to enable its school education system.
In a first-of-its-kind partnership in India, where the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) and the World Economic Forum (WEF) are the other two players, the State has kick-started the Rajasthan Education Initiative which is aimed at encompassing all one lakh schools and making them the focal points of ongoing schemes such as Project GRACE (Girls of Rajasthan and Computer Education); District Computer Education Centres (DCECs) in all 32 districts; departmental computerisation down to block level and EDUSAT ( satellite)-based teacher training. Between the 1991 census and the one conducted a decade later, literacy in the state had almost doubled to over 61 per cent (from 20 to 44 per cent among females and from 54 to 76 per cent among males).
