Chandigarh, July 7:
Punjab School Education Minister Mr. Vijay Inder Singla, on Wednesday, said that Captain Amarinder Singh led state government has decided to convert as many as 17,299 more classrooms of 12,507 government schools into smart classrooms. Mr. Singla said that 24 rooms of 22 District Institute of Education and Training (DIETs) will also be transformed into smart training rooms. The minister said that a budget of Rs. 117 crore would be spent for transformation of these training and classrooms.
The cabinet minister said that the education department will be installing multimedia projector, micro CPU, sound bar, white board for projection and green board for writing in the smart classrooms.
Mr. Vijay Inder Singla said that the Congress government is committed to uplift the standard of education of government schools and to fulfill the commitment, required funds were being allotted to the schools to improve the basic infrastructure. He said that apart from the improvement in the infrastructure facilities, few path-breaking initiatives like online teacher transfer policy, smart schools policy, pre-primary education, digital education and special cadre of teachers working in border areas, which have also led to remarkable improvement in the quality of education across the state. He said it was reflective of the fact that nearly 5.6 lakh students have shifted from private to government schools with 29% increase in the enrollment since last four years thus their parents reposing faith in government schools again. He added that Punjab has also topped the Performance Grading Index (PGI) recently released by the union government on the basis of 70 parameters in the field of school education.
Mr. Singla said that the detailed instructions have already been issued to the district education officers and school heads regarding the installation of new gadgets in the smart classrooms and have been directed to ensure proper availability of power and other resources in the classrooms.
