Vivekdisha at Balarampur and Talbagicha

The discussion started informally when a member of IIT Kharagpur campus community approached NSS, IIT Kharagpur team about possibility of having Vivekdisha program (Link Link2) in our neighbourhood village high schools. The aim is to enhance education experience by conducting Online classes through multimedia : From class 6 onward. The audio part of this video (Link and also at the end of this post) gives a short introduction in Bengali. This was delivered at Balarampur village on 07-02-2013. The images of the video are the ones taken at Balarampur and Talbagicha High School. The last few frames captures a brief stop over of Vivekdisha team in our campus. 

The concerned program officers were very enthusiastic. There was some issue in the beginning at the school level on what this program is. NSS, IIT Kharagpur team organized video conferencing with village school teachers at one end and Amit Maharaj of Vivekdisha at the other end in Belur Math head quarter of Ramakrishna Mission Vivekananda University (RKMVU). It was held more than once. And two village high schools decided to go ahead. The third high school, where we serve, unfortunately is of Hindi medium. Vivekdisha, as of now, delivers content in Bengali. They welcome the idea of developing content in other media by our volunteers.

RKMVU agreed to supplement the hardware available in school. Schools talked about fund crunch for sustaining Rs. 850 p.m. pay out towards BSNL broadband connection. We assured support; we have already talked to PRERANA team juniors. They will talk to seniors, our ex-students. We are sure that something will work out even when we need to borrow from institute to sustain our regular activity due to late or non arrival of fund from Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports.

With this assurance of covering fixed and recurring cost, the schools got it through their managing committee. The biggest hurdle that we had to overcome was to get broadband connection to schools. Senior network engineer of IIT Kharagpur facilitated the process. On 6th Feb., both the schools were ready with connection.

On 7th Feb. 2013, Amit Maharaj and his team from RKMVU came here and the hardware were installed at Balarampur High School. The audio part in the video at the end of this post, is from a small function held at school on this occasion. Then the team went to Talbagicha high school. They assessed the requirement and will be sending required hardware in a week or so. After spending half an hour in the campus, they returned to Belur Math. Besides education support, Vivekdisha wants to serve the needy with tele-medicine based healthcare services.


We are looking forward to a new dimension in our engagement with village population around the campus through Vivekdisha.