Samvidha: A ICT system for personalized offline Internet Access for rural schools

Abstract

Internet is a huge repository of quality learning materials and continues to grow in a faster rate. The school students may be benefited immensely as these learning materials may well supplement their curricular requirements. But Access to the Internet is costly, because it is very expensive to maintain a persistent Internet connection. For some schools in the developing countries like India, this cost may not be affordable specifically in rural schools. This makes way to a digital divide between the rural and urban schools which is unwanted. For these rural schools, limiting the amount of bandwidth consumed is of paramount importance. It is necessary that the schools be connected to the Internet for the least time, in order to minimize the access cost. In this paper, we present a system Samvidha that allows the rural school students to access the Internet contents in an offline fashion.