With an aim to equip school students with IT skills, the UT Administration is set to embark on an ambitious initiative. The UT Department of Information Technology has designed a training programme on Open Source Software, under which around 15,000 students of Government schools in Chandigarh will be trained.
In line with the national policy on Information Technology of Government of India which advocates the use of open standards and open technologies as alternatives to proprietary software solutions, the UT Department of IT has rolled out a programme to educate students of government schools on Open Source Software.
Open Source Software is based on open standards that permit people to share data freely, prevent barriers like lock-in, interoperability etc. and facilitate wider choice between vendors and technology solutions. Accordingly, Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) enables the users to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software.
An official of the UT Department said that the deployment and training under IT Department’s initiative on Open Source Software would be implemented in the government schools under the UT Education Department and students studying in IX and X classes would be trained.
“The UT Education Department has already identified 85 Government schools for running this training. The exposure to Open Source Software attains even more importance as Government of India has its own Open Source Operating System called Bharat Operating System Solutions (BOSS), and it has been endorsed by the government for adoption and implementation on a national scale. BOSS is available in over 20 Indian languages including Hindi and Punjabi. Such open source solutions also offer benefits like reducing imports / conserving foreign exchange, enhancing national security, reducing copyright infringements and enabling localization,” informed the official.
This initiative of the Department of Information Technology would enable training of students on EduBOSS — a variant of BOSS that has been developed by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) primarily to cater to the needs of educational institutions. The IT department has engaged C-DAC Mohali — the Primary Resource Centre for Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) in the Northern Region, to deploy EduBOSS in the Schools of UT Administration and to provide the training on Open Source Software.
The official further said, “Training on Open Source Software would be another major initiative of the UT Department of Information Technology being run in schools. The Department is already running Soft Skills training and IT training in government schools in which over 20,000 students are trained annually.”
Recently, the Department had also announced ‘e-Saksham’ that is aimed at enhancing e-literacy, under which senior citizens and housewives would be trained on IT skills. Chandigarh e-Saksham’ has been designed by the IT Department specifically with a view to bridge the digital divide that is prevalent in segments including senior citizens and housewives of the populace.