Bharti Airtel (known as Airtel), one of India’s leading telecommunications service providers, has announced that it has won the Cloud and CDN mandate from the Digital India Corporation (DIC) to power DIKSHA (Digital Infrastructure for Knowledge Sharing), which is India’s national platform for open education digital content. DIC is under the aegis of the Ministry of Education (MoE), Government of India, the company said through an exchange filing.
With this mandate, Airtel becomes the partner for end-to-end management of DIKSHA’s online platforms across its mobile app and website. As a part of this collaboration, the DIKSHA app and website will now be powered by Airtel Cloud. They will be seamlessly accessible to students nationwide for free educational content in their preferred Indian language. Students, particularly in far-flung and remote locations, can enrol on the platform easily. Airtel Cloud will also lead the migration of DIKSHA to Oracle Cloud and offer its managed services and CDN solutions.
The Digital India Corporation focuses on improving the standard of living of the commoner by providing access to the benefits emerging from Information and Communication Technologies (ICI). Launched in 2017 by the Ministry of Education, DIKSHA aims to provide quality e-content in the form of e-textbooks and audiobooks for free to all teachers and learners nationwide. The startup offers engaging learning material relevant to the prescribed school curriculum to teachers, students and parents. It claims that the platform provides over 5700 crore minutes of learning, and over 7200 courses have witnessed an enrolment and course completion rate of 82 per cent.
Learners and teachers nationwide can access DIKSHA, which currently supports 36 Indian languages. The company’s policies and tools make it possible for the education ecosystem (educationists, experts, organisations, institutions – government, autonomous institutions, non-govt and private organisations) to participate, contribute and leverage a common platform to achieve learning goals at scale for the country.
Speaking about the development, Head – Govt. Business, Airtel Business, Praveen Agarwal, said:
DIKSHA offers 9300+ courses in 35+ Indian languages and has witnessed 50+ billion learning sessions and 60+ billion minutes of usage by students, making it one of the largest free education platforms in the world. We are thrilled to partner with the Ministry of Education to bolster this crucial education infrastructure and advance its accessibility to millions of children across the country with our state-of-the-art cloud and CDN services.
Airtel Cloud is a part of Airtel’s B2B arm– Airtel Business. The company claims that its cloud platform is India’s “leading and most trusted provider of ICT services with a diverse portfolio of offerings to enterprises, governments, carriers, and small and medium businesses.” It leverages private, public and Edge cloud to offer enterprises a one-stop destination for a hybrid cloud strategy. With an all-inclusive portfolio comprising connectivity, data centre and security, and cloud solutions, Airtel cloud enables enterprises to accelerate and optimise their digital transformation journey.
