A Tailwind For Digital Transformation

Across sectors in India, the Covid-19 crisis pushed businesses to embrace technology at a rate they wouldn’t have thought possible otherwise

- HARICHANDAN ARAKALI

In November, the state government of Maharashtra launched a programme called Swadhyay to improve the online education of children around the state. The programme tapped WhatsApp to provide weekly assessments and learning activities to students in classes 1 to 10. Six weeks into the programme, some 1.1 million students in the state were using the service, according to ConveGenius, a Noida-based education tech-social enterprise.

Maharashtra tapped the expertise of ConveGenius and Leadership For Equity, an organisation working to bring positive change to education systems. A cloud services company, Cloudstrats, is helping the state put the programme on the internet. The programme is open to students of schools affiliated to the state education board and is run by the State Council for Education Research and Training.

Poor households even shared smartphones among themselves so that their children could access these tests and activities, said ConveGenius in a press release.

In such ways, ‘digital transformation’, a term commonly associated with large businesses looking to use technology to improve their operations, is slowly becoming a reality even in small-town India, driven by the sheer need for innovation during a global pandemic. Swadhyay is also an example of how grassroots initiatives in India are playing a role in transforming the country into a market for digital services that investors around the world are increasingly interested in.