Bijra
From Dgplug
Contents |
Introduction
If you look into the history of the well known cities of West Bengal,you would be aware that Durgapur has a reputation of having considerable renown in the education section. A large number of schools are located in the city and nearby with some of them having "Computer Education" in their curriculum.
About the School
Bijra High School, Bijra, situated at the vicinity of Durgapur Steel Town Ship, though officially it is located in ward no 2 Durgapur Municipal Corporation is in a poor village Bijra inhabited by poor muslims, SC/ST communities. The near by slum dwellers in Mahuabagan, Hazra Para and William Carey send their children to this school. The school was setup in 1974. It got its recognition from West Bengal Board of Secondary Education as VII class junior high school w.e.f 01/05/1993. The school was upgraded to a high school in the year 1999. At present the role strength of the school is 485.
The parents who send their children to this school are mostly day labourers housemaids. Their monthly income ranges from 1500-3000/-. They cannot afford the charges for computer fees. The school receives only Rs. 125 annually from all of its students. The most wonderful fact which the school proudly proclaims is that the number of Muslim girls reading in this school is more than the number of boys.
The Setup
Details of New Setup Coming
In order to encourage computer literacy among the students of this school, the school arranged a single computer & got donation of two more. The school has not enough resource to buy computers for its students . This two new machine are of P4 series with 256 MB RAM & having 40GB HDD and runs Fedora Core 5 & Fedora Core 6.
Students are learning fast with the little resource available. As told by Kazi Nijamuddin, the Headmaster of the school, every class of around 40-50 students are divided into 2 parts.One by one all students do the practice in the computers.
Volunteers
They are the first in this area to adopt FOSS. dgplug is providing support for this school. Soumya Kanti Chakraborty,(Coordinator, dgplug) initially did the ground job for providing the support to the school, currently Subhodip, Ajitesh are effectively carrying out the same . Sagnik is supporting them in this venture.
Help Needed
We need some help in terms of financial sponsorship as well as course content creation for this project, because the number of computers should be higher than what is present. We can also start teaching FOSS in the other small schools in the locality. If you can help in any way, then please send mail to kushaldas AT gmail DOT com.
Project Status
To know more about the current status visit the project blog.
