National Missions
The National Mission on Education through Information and Communication Technology (NMEICT) has been envisaged to leverage the potential of ICT, in teaching and learning process for the benefit of all the learners in Higher Education Institutions in any time any where mode. This was expected to be a major intervention in enhancing the Gross Enrolment Ratio (GER) in Higher Education by 5 percentage points during the XI Five Year Plan period. The Mission, launched in 2009, is a landmark initiative of the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD), Govt. of India with the objective of seamlessly providing quality educational content to all the eligible and willing learners in India. The goal is to address all the education and learning related needs of students, teachers and lifelong learners and the emphasis on ICT is obvious as it acts as a multiplier for capacity building efforts of educational institutions without compromising the quality. Technological progress can be harnessed for augmenting both expansion as well as quality of education. The Mission is also necessary to sustain a high growth rate of our economy through capacity building and knowledge empowerment of the people and for promoting new, upcoming multi-disciplinary fields of knowledge.
The three cardinal principles of Education Policy viz., access, equity and quality could be served well by providing connectivity to all higher institutions, providing low cost and affordable access-cum-computing devices to students and teachers and providing high quality e-content free of cost to all learners in the country. NMEICT encompasses all the three elements. The Mission has three major components:
(i) content generation;
(ii) providing connectivity to Higher Education Institutions; and
(iii) research and development of low cost access device. Under NMEICT, providing connectivity to 419 Universities/ University level Institutions and all colleges including polytechnics is in progress as well as a new programme called Campus Connect, aiming at making campuses Wi-Fi enabled.
It seeks to bridge the digital divide, i.e. the gap in the skills to use computing devices for the teaching and learning among urban and rural teachers/learners in Higher Education domain and empower those, who have hitherto remained untouched by the digital revolution and have not been able to join the mainstream of the knowledge economy. The focus areas of the Mission include appropriate pedagogy for e-learning, providing facility of performing experiments through virtual laboratories, on-line testing and certification, on-line availability of teachers to guide learners, training of teachers to effectively use the new methods, utilization of Education Satellite (EduSAT) and Direct to Home (DTH) platforms etc. National Digital Library (NDL) has taken up the mammoth task of collating and harvesting all the digitized and digital content available across the educational institutions in the country and indexing and hosting them for facilitating search and access to open content through a single window. SAKSHAT is envisaged as one stop education portal expected to be the main delivery platform, integrating all the contents developed under the Mission and also facilitating public scrutiny, feedback and transparency for the projects undertaken by the Mission.