IT’s not working in Sonepat school

SONEPAT: A visit to Government Senior Secondary School in the district’s Chidana village could be an eye-opener for the Manohar Lal Khattar government, which takes great pride in having taken information technology (IT) to the people and markets IT-enabled services as one of its achievements.

Computers at Government Senior Secondary School at Chidana village in Sonepat district gather dust. photo by writer

Geetanjali Gayatri

Tribune News Service

Sonepat, March 18

A visit to Government Senior Secondary School in the district’s Chidana village could be an eye-opener for the Manohar Lal Khattar government, which takes great pride in having taken information technology (IT) to the people and markets IT-enabled services as one of its achievements.

Computer education, in this school with strength of 500 students, is taught theoretically because none of the computers is in working order. Repeated reminders to the School Education Department to get them repair have elicited no response.

A separate room has been earmarked for the 10-odd computers which were installed in 2014, but the machines have been gathering dust for the past three years. The computer teacher admits she has taken no practical class for sessions together.

For students, computers are dummy machines. They know about different parts of computer, but ask them how they the machine works and they are clueless. The fault is not theirs.

The school principal claims to have written numerous letters to the department, seeking repair of computers, but nobody seems interested in attending to the complaints.

“Frankly, we have now given up. For how long the school authorities can keep writing to the department? Nobody listens to us because the head office has its own priorities,” a teacher, not wishing to be identified, says.

The computer room has a number of old machines which were replaced by the “new” ones and are lying dumped in a corner. Nobody has cared to take these away since new computers were installed.

The indifference, teachers say, is ironical since the Khattar government is hard-selling IT in a big way and applying it to the several public services while. They add computer education in most schools around Chidana village has met with a similar fate.

The previous Congress government’s Edusat programme for providing quality lessons to students in rural schools has also come a cropper. No lessons are being aired anymore, while the equipment, including television sets and batteries, has been lying defunct.