NEW DELHI: After the Centre announced that it would be making a switch to digital boards from pre-existing blackboards in every government school in the country in a phased manner, it has now estimated that nearly Rs 9,000 crore is required to create two smart classrooms for every government and government-aided schools across the country within the next seven years.
The Union Human Resources Development Ministry has set a target of creating nearly 3 lakh smart classrooms by 2023 at the cost of Rs 2.4 lakh per classroom.
Also, Rs 60,000 per classroom will be spent to maintain the digital classroom every year, as per the draft expenditure finance committee note on the project.
The EFC note on the scheme provides for two smart classrooms for every senior secondary and secondary school that will include nearly 1.1 lakh government, 43,000 government-aided and 17,00 Kendriya and Navodaya Vidyalayas — making a total of about 1.46 lakh schools.
“The scheme provides the non-recurring cost of Rs 2.4 lakh for the display systems for two smart classrooms per school and recurring cost of Rs 3 lakh for 5 years,” the draft also says.
The sharing pattern is 60:40 between Centre and states, except north-eastern and hilly states where the ratio will be 90:10.
A senior official in the school education and literacy department in the Ministry said that an expert committee constituted for the scheme has also emphasised on the need of availability and smooth distribution for “quality e-content and strong monitoring mechanism for the usage of hardware and e-content.”
“There will also be a provision to set up central command unit at NCERT for monitoring current and previous school It infrastructure,” he said. “Similarly, states will set up their command centres at SCERTs to monitor the usage of the econtent,” he added