NIIT Limited on the occasion of the World Computer Literacy Day (WCLD) 2005 is planning to set up computer literacy kiosks in 20 locations spread over the rural areas of the country and to train 20,000 village children free of cost.
Speaking at a function jointly organised by the Rotary Club, Calcutta Metro City to help bridge the digital divide, Tulika Sinha, vice president India east, NIIT said that there are already 40 such kiosks existing across the country and in addition to the above would also provide computer training to 50,000 people at a reduced cost.
"NIIT would be providing this familiarising training at a much reduced fee on a specially developed programme called Swift, a simple, interactive and easy to learn programme for basic learners. This recent addition of the numbers in training would make the number of people touched by the WCLD programme reach half a million mark, making it one of the most powerful computer literacy movement in the country.
This mission has been launched through the education centres of NIIT in nearly 30 countries.
As a part of the joint initiative with Rotary in the city, NIIT will train one child absolutely free of cost for every child sponsored by the city-based corporate and non government organisations, Sinha added.
In order to educate the under privileged children, NIIT would also use the methodology of the World Bank funded project Hole in the Wall experiment conducted by Sugata Mitra, using the minimally invasive education experiment wherein computers are installed for unsupervised use of children in slums and impoverished locations to show that irrespective of the socio-economic background children learn to use computers by themselves if provided with the right kind of infrastructure.
Mitra and his team have verified this by testing six to thirteen year olds from Kashmir to Kanyakumari starting from 1999.
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