In five years, education technology will progress tremendously: Srinivasan Ramani

Pioneering internet connectivity in India in the early 1980s, Srinivasan Ramani was the first Indian to be inducted into The Internet Hall of Fame in 2014.

As founding director of National Centre for Software Technology (rechristened C-DAC), his leadership and vision led to the creation of the nationwide Education and Research Network (ERNET), a platform dedicated to support the needs of the research and education community within the country.

In an interaction with Rasheed Kappan of DH, Ramani traces the early days of the internet in India while seeking a relook at the state of online education during the pandemic era.

The beginning of the Internet revolution in India was linked to the premier educational institutes. Could you recall experiences from those initial days?

That was a great time for certain research institutions. The research scientists, irrespective of their disciplines, were all excited by the prospect of the Internet. Many physicists and chemists took great personal interest in getting the necessary infrastructure installed in their offices.

If not available, they would travel for long distances to access those facilities. During 1988-90, we had a colleague from IIT Kanpur who was very keen that the institute should be connected with internet. The link was critical for international connections. He came to Bombay and told us that they needed internet connection badly but it was impossible to get the telecommunication facility to Kanpur.

To get around this, we, the ERNET team and the IIT Kanpur computer centre director, worked out a scheme. We resolved it in a peculiar way. IIT Kanpur built itself a local area network, with local cables connected to different buildings, to enable sending inter-department mails. The computer centre would then write on tape the email that was supposed to go abroad and to other cities in India.

The mails, put on media such as tape or floppy discs, were then delivered by speed post to Bombay. It would take a day or two. In Bombay, the mails would be read through a reading device, fed into Ethernet and then get into the global Internet.

So, somebody in IIT Kanpur could send an email to someone in the University of Illinois in three days. The reply would take another three days. It was still a great improvement because you could send a 20-page paper without worrying about a big envelope, big stamp, a lot of money, and a month or two for delivery. We called it the floppy mail.

After initial hiccups, Internet penetration progressed slowly. Why was the spread slow?

I feel if we had good telecommunications in those days, it would have been fantastic. But what we did have was the enthusiasm of teams of scientists who said we will not work without the Internet.

However, what eventually was possible in a research lab or an advanced institute, could not happen in every arts and science college and every high school. Millions and millions of students were denied these facilities for years because we were still developing in telecom.

But great days lay ahead. In the mid-1990s, Indian telecom underwent a change when monopoly control over it was removed and private players were allowed to enter. By 1995, they were into the internet scene as well.

Privatisation of telecom and the huge revolution that followed in the telecom sector made a very big change. Without that kind of change, I don’t think Indian software technology would be where it is today.

Propelled by social-distancing needs, education has shifted online. But this transition has not been smooth. Your thoughts.

The real change is now. The same schools and colleges that used to threaten students that their phones would be confiscated if brought them to the campus are driving that change. Their idea about the phone as a tool of distraction, as an enemy of education, has to be given up. We have to develop the confidence that we can somehow share values with our students that will make them self-disciplined.

We should use the smartphone as a very important instrument. Finally, that position is becoming unavoidable. Today, even the very poor want them. I know a domestic servant earning Rs 2,000 per month spent Rs 15,000 to get a good phone so that her son could access the best school lessons.

In the search for hi-tech solutions, are we failing to fully exploit the potential of existing low-tech options?

Even when devices are available, the knowledge about them is poor. For instance, there are Bluetooth speakers available in the market that can easily connect to smartphones. This way, the sound can be amplified so that an entire classroom can hear. It can help even children with hearing issues.

If we seriously scale up at the government level, a lot of educational content in spoken form can be disseminated through speaker-linked phones. We need it because it is easy to create content in Indian languages in spoken form. Almost everyone is comfortable if good spoken material is recorded and made available as valuable educational material.

Technology, high or low, can face accessibility issues. For instance, there was this boy whose phone was not picking up signals to access his school lessons online. He went to a mobile service shop where he was told that the signals were not going through the metal corrugated roof of his house. The boy found that the phone worked well outside.

How do you think will online education evolve in India in the future?

I suspect that in the next five years, education technology will progress tremendously in India. I see that already happening. A few months ago, I had gone to an engineering college in Mumbai where education had shifted online post-Covid. They had tied up with an online course provider, after which 3,500 courses relevant to engineering became available to the students.

Within three months, students had completed the course, taken the online examination and earned 13,000 certificates. This amazing turn has brought to Indian education a terrific flexibility. An electronics engineer can now learn something about mechanical engineering, unlike earlier. The normal system does not allow this.

Did reluctance to release spectrum play a role?

Tremendous improvements occurred when we got the freedom. But there was a time when we could not get the required spectrum. For research, we needed one or two wireless frequencies to send computer data over radio frequency. The people controlling access to the radio spectrum wanted to know why we were asking since they had told ‘no’ even to the Ahmedabad police.

So, we had to wait for a few years to get spectrum. But today, look at how much spectrum we have. Spectrum earns lakhs and crores of rupees. How many million cell phone signals are being carried at the same time!

But this electromagnetic spectrum has always been there. It has been ours. But why did we not use it? We did not encourage enterprise that goes out and tries out new technology. We are very cautious that somebody might misuse the spectrum and we may not have enough capacity and it may be required for the defence. We have all kinds of cautious thoughts.