Panda S. and Chaudhary S. (2001) Ghana’s Telelearning and Telelearning Centres in India, in Latchem C. and Walker D.(eds) Telecentre: Case Studies and Key Issues. The Commonwealth of Learning

online: http://www.col.org/telecentres/chapter%2014.pdf

The authors start presenting an overview of the Indian telecommunication environment and of past educational projects through satellite TV and videoconference. It goes on describing in details two projects: the Jhabua Development Communication Project and the IGNOU Telelearning Centres and virtual campus initiative.

The first project is a satellite-based broadcast and interactive networks for education, training

and development. Educational and training programmes have since been transmitted five days a week on agriculture, watershed management, health, education, socio-economic and human resource development, and cultural issues. They plan to convert the entire system into digital.

Researches shows that the percentage of viewers is typically around 37% – 38% of the potential audience, the viewers tend to be male and the most literate of the population. The main reasons given for people not viewing the TV programmes are lack of time, lack of desire to engage in such activity, and the distances being too great to the receive sites. Moreover, it has been found that the village halls used as receive sites were not ideally suited to this purpose. Acoustics and viewing conditions were often bad and in some cases the TV sets had been stolen or there were other kinds of technical problems. The language used where often to academic.

The second experience described is the one of the IGNOU (Indira Gahndi National Open University) which have currently 28 telelearning centres, including eight in Delhi, which offer two academic programs. Centres are equipped with at least 50 Pentium computers, printers, scanners, digital camera kits, colour TVs, data projection equipment and antennas for teleconferencing.

The article goes on mentioning some other Indian experience using ICTs for social development. The article ends proposing a vision for the future: the present approach to rural telecommunication needs to shift from politics-focused and subsidy-driven to function-focused and economy-driven.