Shikshagraha Partners with AWS for Education Ecosystem

Shikshagraha, a people’s education movement to improve one million public schools in India, today announced it will use cloud computing technology from Amazon Web Services (AWS) to power its technology-based improvement initiatives across India. As a people’s movement, Shikshagraha will foster collaboration among government bodies, local civil society organizations (CSOs), youth, and community-based groups, so that they can lead need-based school improvement programs and solutions. The movement aims to impact 40 million children across 100 districts by 2030 and is already active in multiple states and union territories, including Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Haryana, Jharkhand, Karnataka, Kashmir, Odisha, Punjab, Puducherry, Tamil Nadu, Telangana, and Uttar Pradesh.

Public schooling in India faces multiple challenges in the quest to deliver quality education to all students. Impactful interventions by different stakeholders exist in silos, the best practices from one region are not readily available for the educators in the ecosystem, and teachers and school leaders - closest to the problem - do not have the agency to design the solutions. Shikshagraha aims to tackle each of these through a collective approach – it catalyzes decentralised action for education programs and implementation, facilitates collaboration between district education departments and local CSOs, adopts a continuous learning and micro-improvement approach, and uses modern digital infrastructure to enable stakeholders to enhance student learning outcomes.

ShikshaLokam, a CSO founded under the aegis of Shibulal Family Philanthropic Initiatives is building the improvement capabilities (Digital Public Goods) over Sunbird platform for the education ecosystem, in partnership with Tekdi Technologies for hosting and management. The micro-improvement approach helps stakeholders break down school improvement ideas into clear, actionable, feasible projects that can be implemented within their locus of control. At the same time, education leaders, District Institutes of Education and Training (DIET) and CSOs work collectively to map key issues, prioritise shared concerns, and co-create solutions to address the problems.

“At the heart of our Shikshagraha initiative is the belief that every child deserves the opportunity to achieve their fullest potential. The problem Shikshagraha aims to solve – improving all public schools in India – is one of scale. While application of technology is the answer to address this challenge, we also know we can deliver the technology intervention only through cloud computing,” said Vijayashree Urs, Chief Technology Officer - ShikshaLokam, one of the co-builders of the Shikshagraha movement. ShikshaLokam believes in collective action to resolve the complex education inequity challenge with speed, at scale and sustainably. Over the years, it has accelerated the same for systemic education transformation and drawing from lessons learned, ShikshaLokam is now actively building the Shikshagraha movement. She added, “We are relying on AWS for a robust, scalable, cost-efficient, and secure experience to power our solutions, so we can focus on driving collective action in the community, and enabling large-scale change on the ground. Shikshagraha will host a repository of best practices around solving unique challenges in schools.  We plan to use AWS’s services to further enhance teacher and system effectiveness, using technologies like artificial intelligence.”

The Shikshagraha solutions and tools will be hosted on AWS, relying on the world’s most comprehensively adopted cloud to adopt a pay-as-you-go model for technology infrastructure while engaging multiple CSO partners seamlessly to serve varied needs across districts. Shikshagraha will leverage the on-demand nature of cloud computing services for school improvement programs across 100 districts in the next five years, optimize technology costs through AWS’s cost optimization tools, and secure its platform through AWS security services. AWS will also host the micro-improvements repository to enable seamless capture and presentation of improvements across schools.

“Enabling quality education to improve the lives of people in India is critical to achieve inclusive growth in the country. Shikshagraha has a unique and focused approach to improve India's public education system by focusing on teachers and leaders who can inspire students, and cloud computing is set to play a pivotal role in supporting this goal,” said Pankaj Gupta, Leader – Public Sector, AWS India Private Limited*. “AWS is privileged to support ShikshaLokam, and pleased to empower the Shikshagraha solutions for educators, the government and civil society, giving them the tools to bring real change.”

Key AWS services that will power Shikshagraha include Amazon Managed Service for Apache Druid, to achieve a cost-effective, highly available, resilient, and fault tolerant hosting environment; Amazon OpenSearch Service for real-time search, monitoring, and analysis of business and operational data; Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (MSK), to ingest and process streaming data in real-time; Amazon ElastiCache for Redis, to achieve sub-millisecond latency to power internet-scale real-time applications; and AWS security group, which acts as a virtual firewall to control incoming and outgoing traffic.

The Shikshagraha movement seeks to ensure that all students, regardless of socio-economic background, gender, or abilities, learn effectively in classrooms and develop necessary skills. This will be achieved through school improvement programs in 100 districts, amplifying youth participation in the education system, and enabling community involvement in school improvements. The Shikshagraha team plans to work closely with AWS to develop new technological offerings such as AI-based tools, dashboards, and visualisations, to drive the Shikshagraha movement's exponential growth.