Let’s face it: the Indian farmer has never had it so good. Despite socio-economic disparities and absence of infrastructure, thirteen good monsoons have created a flood of economic well being. There is ready cash in many a rural pocket.

Earlier, in the eighties, due to a set of chance factors as well as by policy design, traditional perceptions that literacy was unnecessary almost vanished. The much-touted ills of our education system notwithstanding, and despite the ‘missing girl-child’ syndrome, today parents all over the country are increasingly ensuring that their children go through some schooling.

The poor see basic education and literacy as the key to unlocking the fetters of poverty and lack of choice. For the better off, education is widely seen as a major way of improving prospects, productivity and profits. Combine this widely felt demand for education with the (relatively) vibrant economic situation, and one has a recipe for creating a nation of learners. Even if we now get a few disastrous monsoons, it is likely that the vacation from productive employment so created will be spent in retraining, extending one’s learning, and preparing for better days.

On the positive side, this is potentially one of the most hopeful developmental signals from the Indian rural society in recent decades. On the negative side, it is easy to unscrupulously exploit this demand. Low literacy levels of the older generation allow large numbers of learners to be duped by teaching shops providing mass scale doses of sub-standard information - this is lucrative; it is happening. So, when TARAhaat began operations, it did not require a market survey to recognise that amongst all information-oriented services, education was the one most in demand: by an order of magnitude more than others. At least for now and for some more time to come.

Broadening New Horizons .....

Therefore, TARAgyan (Hindi, gyan = ‘knowledge’, used here in the sense of ‘education’) was started on a priority basis as TARAhaat’s education channel, aiming to deliver meaningful, world-class education, right in the learners’ village, and in their own language.

What kind of gyan does TARAgyan give?

A major route for creating sustainable livelihoods in large numbers is through education. TARAhaat sees 
education as a prerequisite to creating sustainable livelihoods by providing job skills (avenues to money, enhancement of skills on the job) and life skills (enrichment of life, health and productive use of leisure). A second order prerequisite is meaningful conventional education (an avenue to diplomas and degrees), so as to create motivation and ability to utilise the other types of learning ultimately required for a livelihood.

TARAgyan operationalised this thinking by defining three streams to begin with: vocational education, self-improvement courses, and conventional education.

In keeping with the fact that a rapidly increasing number of young people today read and write, TARAgyan does not plan to treat basic literacy as a priority. There are a large number of philanthropic initiatives that aim to fill this need, and it would be quite easy for these to piggyback on TARAhaat’s increasing reach to rural illiterates. Already, the portal allows orientation (to some degree) towards multi-media communication and ‘read out text’ for illiterates.

The public education system has been designed for teachers to teach, not for learners to learn. Like many systems perpetuated for the convenience of the supplier rather than for the user, the education system has
become a teaching system, based on mindlessly memorising and reproducing large quantities of information. Success in studies and life are achieved despite the system, not because of it.

TARAgyan, as a lot of others, wants to break the mould, not just for intellectual reasons but for practical ones as well. For how long can a nation sustain a flow of schooled young people who are unemployable, except perhaps in unproductive government jobs that are as much a part of the problem as any other factor? The conventional ideal of a secure and salaried job is already giving way on the ground. As a majority of Indians are literate today, there just aren’t enough of those traditional employment avenues any more.

TARAgyan aims to arm a new generation of learners with the tools for generating some meaning in their lives. Self-confident people, motivated and questioning, who can grab opportunities and create their own future. A community that might break, hopefully, the feudal chains that bind it to an unsustainable and irrelevant way of doing things.

How does TARAgyan deliver its content?

Since everybody is different, there are immense challenges in the area of pedagogy and technology besides social resistance to change, that TARAgyan has to grapple with. By the time TARAKendras saturate at a number approximating 40,000, it is estimated that there shall be over 2.75 million learners that TARAgyan shall touch each year. And, there are no case studies to go by; there is no past experience to rely upon.

In a firmament without marked directions, three factors are clear. One, TARAgyan’s content and delivery mechanism should use very little local human resource. Secondly, it must use the best technologies in ICT to create a shift of communication from one-way to two-way, from cramming to information assimilation, indeed, towards meaningful infotainment. Three, it must be scaleable. In the past, scaleable meant replicable, which was a euphemism for mindlessly repeatable. Today, it is possible to conceive of networked expert-facilitator-learner-machine systems that are customised to the level of achievement, the aptitude, and the learning style of every individual.

TARAgyan shall rely on virtual subject area specialists, because there is too much variety and geographical difficulty for them to be available locally. Still, one cannot put into operation a teacher-less model (the predominant model on the Internet today) if it has to deliver learner confidence and values. Since TARAhaat is not just a web portal but also essentially a network of franchised centres, TARAgyan has a way to physically reach each student, not with specialists but with motivated ‘generalists’. TARAgyan is developing a cadre of self-employed enabling educators to guide student learning. There will always be the specialist and reference material at the other end of e-mail or a chat line.

But, TARAgyan’s success shall lie in these non-virtual, human educators. Work is underway to create a large investment in attitudinal, motivational and skills training. This training shall be continual and ongoing, and shall become an essential TARAgyan activity. TARAgyan shall make sure that content is offered in a multi-dimensional, consciousness encouraging way, for example by helping learners to consider implications of the content on social and psychological planes: by developing an inclusive worldview and by helping learners to be aware of their own aims, choices and methods at every step.

Can this system cover vocational skills that may require manipulation of objects that cannot be transmitted over a web connection that cannot be captured in a CD? Is a significant improvement possible in, say, masonry skills, with TARAgyan? Can coffee-tasting skills be learnt over a medium that is primarily visual and auditory? We do not know, though best examples of multi-media communication support coupled with video-conferencing may be a part of the answer. By design, TARAgyan shall cross many difficult bridges when it comes to them, at the same time setting up an enabling mechanism instead if necessary by jumping in, dirtying its hands, experimenting, discovering what works, adopting and adapting.

So, TARAgyan is an evolutionary and responsive process, not a static product. Counselling and feedback, virtual or real, online or offline, are central activities for its success.

There is a real danger of TARAgyan falling into the old systems and becoming a tuition shop for cramming for irrelevant examinations. This is because, even more than the mass of educators in the system, the majority of potential learners and their parents are unaware of any other system. They even vaguely believe that all that cramming and occasional corporal punishment is actually necessary for learning! TARAgyan aims to turn that orientation around. The courses under design aim to impart experience in application, building up real skills, and recalling relevant facts from a pool of information, and in that order of priority. This order is exactly the reverse of that in the conventional system today.

The orientation towards application would exhibit itself by, say, starting a word-processing course by typing a letter, learning the keystrokes, commands and choices that appear along the way ‘on the fly’. Once the experience is established in the student’s mind, information such as the history of word processing may follow if the learner is interested. Since many of the courses would aim towards employment, the needs of that employment would also play a part in determining the learning outcomes, to the exclusion of deep theory (which has a place in its own right, but not for TARAgyan students, at least not for now).

Another manifestation of this learning-centered approach is how TARAgyan monitors and grades student progress and results. Though standardised quantitative evaluation graded by levels of difficulty is planned, the evaluation system shall grow towards being based on individual student profiling rather than on grades so as to capture the individuality of each learner. Every student would get a randomised examination paper, reducing the reliance on techniques of copying and cheating that are so common in India toady. Depending on the subject, examinations could be framed so as to be difficult to complete in the time allotted, forcing students not to waste time in referring and into prioritising their attempts according to the likelihood of success in different sections. Achievement scores and percentiles would replace the blind marking system as commonly practiced today, while relative grading and negative scoring may have to wait until students get used to competing with their peers. TARAgyan believes that this approach will meet the needs of many employers who today seek appropriate attitudes, well-written CVs, and descriptive profiles about real skills than just certification and marks.

A central feature of TARAgyan’s content is the issue of language. All TARAgyan communication will be without purity in language. Since even computer systems, operated in English, are understood in the vernacular, with technical terms and commands being retained in the original English form, TARAgyan uses mixed language text to communicate. This feature is working well, paralleling the use, by private Hindi television channels, of a smattering of English terms that are common or technical.

Much of the poor quality of understanding and lack of confidence amongst rural students can be ascribed to non-availability of material in their own language. Sometimes, translated material is too purist (using what used to be called ‘All India Radio Hindi’, for instance) and so meaningless to the reader even though the target language may be her/his first language.

In a dream world, one would get, say, the Encyclopaedia Britannica and allow a student familiar with mainly Punjabi to hover his mouse over the text and read it in his own language instantly. Till such time as that dream could be realised, TARAgyan is developing a large capacity for high volume, high-speed off-line translations in all the languages.

Another dream is to create text by speaking into the machine, rather than by typing. Since that isn’t going to happen tomorrow, TARAhaat is investing in easy-to-learn standardised vernacular fonts. An important decision was made about the font maps used. This is based on the simple, observable fact that people end up being fluent in using only one keyboard layout in their lifetime. For better or worse, the QWERTY keyboard is a de facto international standard. Therefore, TARAhaat does away with having to overlay multiple language keys patches on the keyboard, or resorting to the inefficient ‘typing by mouse’ methods, or choosing between various mechanical typewriter keyboard layouts in the Indian languages. Instead, all languages are typed in QWERTY using Roman phonetics in Indian languages (i.e., typing "tarahaT" leads to "tarahaT"). We find that most users are familiar enough with the sounds and shapes of the Roman alphabet for this technique to work even if they do not know English.

Can TARAgyan pay for itself?

Yes, it can. It is a significant revenue stream for TARAhaat today, and will remain so in the TARAhaat network for some time to come.

TARAgyan’s commercial model is highly flexible and shall continue to learn from field experience. At this time, it seems that one can look at broadly three kinds of content delivery.

First, high value skills are imparted by one-on-one learning in more or less the dominant web and CD enabled education model today (termed type A). Second, education though a mix of educator and machines, with an emphasis on practical hands-on task oriented environment (termed type B). Third, a large group of students using the ICT almost like a TV broadcast, with the additional functions of polling and interactivity (termed type C).

With a combination of all these types, one can get about 12 registered students per computer at any time in a TARAkendra. Centres themselves shall be of different sizes. Small centres with one or two computers, and therefore a limited number of students to spread overheads will be marginal. Centres with three or more computers will generate robust revenues. In time the nationwide average of computers per Kendra is estimated to approach five. While the cost of courses to students will vary, the overall value to the Kendra owner is designed to deliver Rs 40 per hour per computer, well in excess of the sustainable rate for surfing. While TARAgyan’s share of the revenues is considerably lower than that of the Kendra, when compounded by the total number of students is sufficient to generate adequate returns on the substantial investment being made in infrastructure and course developments. The nature of the mission and the need to create a new paradigm that has not been tried in India conventionally, TARAgyan’s investments in human resource, content and software development will be even greater than a conventional commercial operation. . This aggregates to millions of dollars for a number of years.

This investment itself is of two types. First, for clearly viable and demanded courses that can pay for itself after a sufficient mass of learners is available. Second, for socially desirable but not-so-viable courses that can pay only for the operational delivery costs but not for the capital. Accordingly, TARAgyan is seeking strategic partners in both the cases.

So where is TARAgyan now?

There are about 400 learners who have taken some TARAgyan course or other. Besides, about three times as
many potential learners have enquired about TARAgyan services. While there is no conscious exclusion of the middle aged and older persons, TARAgyan courses are currently popular with the youth. Girls are taking these courses in a considerable number (about 25% of the total student population). All this has happened in about three months.

TARAgyan is a lean division of TARAhaat with only two full time professionals at this time. It believes in outsourcing as much work as possible to partners, and not inventing everything in-house. TARAgyan has already tied with some, while collaborations with others are continually being explored.

A TARAgyan advisory board is also in the process of development.

Where will TARAgyan go?

TARAgyan’s internal risk factors are mainly that success depends upon a sufficiently large enrolment. This shall be possible only in tandem with increase in the number of TARAkendras. Its financial struggles are mainly in finding investment and grant funds to underwrite its huge development costs. External risks include the fact that social mobilisation may prove either slow or expensive (in motivation and attitudinal training of a very large human resource base). Besides all these, the pedagogical and technical factors are major challenges in their own right.

TARAhaat promises to be one of the significant change agents in rural Indian perceptions and attitudes, as well as a potential source of facilitating the formation of a very large and productive, employable workforce in the future. A pipe dream? Remember, cynics never changed the world, and parts of this scenario are already coming true out there in the villages.                                               
                                                                                                                                q Sanjay Prakash

The Stockholm Challenge The Stockholm Challenge is a unique Awards programme for pioneering information technology projects that have made an impact on the lives of people and societies on any part of the world creating new and more democratic structures. Among the 742 projects from 90 countries in seven categories, TARAhaat.com is one of the 14 finalists in the category – ‘A Global Village’.