EdIndia Foundation: Empowering India's Future Through Education and Innovation

Education serves as the cornerstone of a promising future, yet many Indian children, particularly those from rural or disadvantaged backgrounds, confront substantial hurdles in their educational journey. While free education is a fundamental right, the quality of education remains a challenge. Recent data from the 2021 National Achievement Survey underscores this disparity, with rural students lagging behind their urban peers, especially in states like Maharashtra.

Amid these challenges, EdIndia Foundation shines as a beacon of hope. Founded in 2019, it wields technology and data analytics to bring transformative change to India's educational landscape, reaching over 5 million lives. In March 2022, EdIndia partnered with UNESCO Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Education for Peace and Sustainable Development (MGIEP), training more than 3,000 teachers to leverage digital tools and embrace Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) for enhanced student engagement.

Moreover, EdIndia Foundation collaborates with UNICEF YuWaah to empower India's youth, aiding them in finding meaningful employment opportunities. Operating across six states, it leads three flagship initiatives:

1. The Teacher Education Program aims at preparing ‘Teachers of the future’ by building capacity of pre-service and in-service teachers, so that every child in the country has access to quality education.

2. The Data Analytics Support aims at empowering education officials and government administrators to make informed decisions, driven by data.

3. The Community Empowerment Program works towards empowering the parents and communities to become active stakeholders in child’s learning journey fostering active parental engagement and improving literacy levels.

Scaling capacity with Amazon Web Services (AWS)

EdIndia has devised a programme aimed at enhancing the capabilities of in-service teachers in both subject matter expertise and pedagogical skills. This programme also involves replicating the delivery of engaging educational content through teachers in the classroom. Central to this endeavour is EdIndia's Pragyan app. With the use of AWS (Amazon Web Services) to host this application, EdIndia has managed to rapidly and efficiently reach a vast number of teachers with a smaller team than traditional, in-person programmes would require.

The Pragyan app, in combination with virtual classrooms equipped with smart TVs, empowers teachers to easily share content in their classrooms and provides them with detailed lesson plans. This support allows EdIndia to ensure that teachers can effectively convey all key concepts in the appropriate sequence. Notably, on the day of its launch, EdIndia successfully onboarded 50,000 teachers onto its platform using the Pragyan app on AWS. Additionally, the programme includes a weekly online forum and monthly interactive online sessions to engage nearly 200,000 teachers simultaneously.

To maintain optimal app performance and availability during high-traffic periods, EdIndia utilises AWS Auto Scaling and Elastic Load Balancer (ELB). Their video content and class materials are hosted on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), and Amazon Route53 is employed to reliably route end users to the application. EdIndia keeps a close watch on their application's performance with Amazon CloudWatch, setting up CloudWatch alarms to receive notifications about its state.

Engaging actively with AWS's non-profit segment team, EdIndia is leveraging technology to enhance this initiative, with plans to establish a dedicated job portal for teachers using AWS and explore the deployment of chatbot solutions to address student and teacher queries on a large scale.

EdIndia places a significant emphasis on data's role in informed policymaking within the education sector. Accumulating over 200 million data points throughout its operations, it seeks to harness this wealth of information to aid policymakers in analysing student performance, attendance, graduation rates, and other crucial factors. These insights contribute to informed policy decisions in the field of education.

Sterlite Power is proud to support this cause, continuing to make a meaningful impact in the lives of teachers and students throughout the nation. Together, they march toward a brighter and more equitable future for all.