Airtel Business partners with Centre for India's edtech platform DIKSHA

Bharti Airtel has won the cloud and content delivery network (CDN) mandate from the Digital India Corporation (DIC) for the DIKSHA (Digital Infrastructure for Knowledge Sharing) platform, which is the Centre's national platform for open education digital content.

DIC is under the aegis of the Ministry of Education (MoE), Government of India.

"With this mandate, Airtel becomes the trusted partner for end-to-end management of DIKSHA’s online platforms across its mobile application and website," the telecom operator said in a statement on Tuesday.

The DIKSHA application and website will now be powered by Airtel Cloud and will be available to students across the country for free educational content in their preferred Indian language. Students, particularly those in far-flung and remote locations, would be able to simply enlist on the platform.

Airtel Cloud will also lead the migration of DIKSHA to Oracle Cloud and provide managed services as well as CDN solutions.

DIKSHA offers 9,300 courses in 35 Indian languages and has witnessed 50 billion learning sessions and 60+ billion minutes of usage by students, making it one of the largest free education platforms in the world, said Praveen Agarwal, head of government business for Airtel Business.

"We are thrilled to partner with the Ministry of Education to bolster this crucial education infrastructure and advance its accessibility to millions of children across the country with our state-of-the-art cloud and CDN services," he added.

Airtel Cloud is a part of Airtel’s B2B arm, Airtel Business, and is India’s leading and most trusted provider of ICT services, with a diverse portfolio of offerings to enterprises, governments, carriers, and small and medium businesses. Airtel Cloud leverages private, public, and edge clouds to offer enterprises a one-stop destination for a hybrid cloud strategy.

Launched in 2017 by the Ministry of Education, DIKSHA aims to provide quality e-content in the form of e-textbooks and audiobooks for free to all teachers and learners across the country. The platform offers over 570 billion minutes of learning, and over 7,200 of its courses have witnessed an enrolment and course completion rate of 82 per cent.