From the Foundry of Sanskrit to Powerhouse of Software — A 10 year RoadMap For Mithila
In a previous article (https://medium.com/@jalajboy/from-the-foundry-of-sanskrit-to-powerhouse-of-software-can-mithila-be-turned-to-a-e44d29a5218c), I have argued that given Mithila’s thousand plus years of tradition of learning, knowledge, philosophy, logic, language, mathematics, and mastery of Sanskrit, a complex skill to master in those times, it is a fertile ground to build computer programming and software development skills that can turn it into a global powerhouse in 10+ years. I have referred to the case study of Melkote in Karnataka and suggested that if Mithila can inculcate the tradition of programming across all its villages, it can reverse the economic degradation as Mithila will emerge as a global destination for software services.
In this follow-on article, I will lay out my vision of a 10-year plus roadmap to get to this dream. Let’s follow Jeff Bezos’s approach on how to achieve a new skill, new objective, new goal — start from the end and work back to figure out the intermediate steps / milestones / achievements needed to accomplish the goal till you are back at the starting point. Here we go.
What Is the 10 Year Vision?
Objective: Make Mithila a Global Powerhouse of Computer Programming
Desired State: Every household in every village has at least 2 computer programmers / software developer.
Pre-requisite: Every village school offers computer programming as a subject. Every school has the compute infrastructure, hardware, programming software, teachers/instructors, problems / projects that the students can work on, mechanism to review and grade the students.
Bonus: Each village has a programming club where students spend few hours learning from each other, collaborating to build software useful to the village and community and participating in global/ national programming contests.
So now we have new objectives — achieve the pre-requisite. Let us see how we can achieve the pre-requisites above.
Village level compute infrastructure
How can every village school get access to compute infrastructure at low cost? Physical computer lab creation at every school will require significant CapEx on hardware, software, lab space, air conditioning, electrical capacity, security etc. It will also take significant time even if there are funds to support CapEx. Also, since the usage will be fairly small in the early years, it will lead to obsolesce and therefore it is not advised to look at building physical computer lab infrastructure in every village school.
Cloud based computer labs are an entirely different value proposition in this case. They only need to be accessed through any terminal device — phone, tablet, PC, laptop, dumb terminals etc. cloud based labs can offer fast hardware, latest programming software — IDE, compiler, debugger, help systems etc. Further, these can be offered by the actual hours used lowering overall costs. Cloud infrastructure can stay current with latest hardware, software at no additional cost /effort. With reasonably good internet bandwidth and low-cost internet charges prevalent throughout the country, cloud-based computer labs emerge as a strong candidate to meet the needs of computer labs in every village school.
Teachers / Instructors / Courses availability at Village level
This is a real challenge and nearly impossible to meet through physical teacher availability. Many village schools have no teachers for even core reading, writing and math skills. Training existing teachers for programming is a challenge as well.
The solution may be to augment existing teachers with the best possible digital tools — video lectures, books and eBooks, tutorials, hand-on videos to start with and latest technologies such as AI based chatbots, AI based virtual teachers etc over time.
A central repository of say popular programming courses using local language, Maithili, as the medium of instruction can be a very powerful way to communicate in the language of young children and help them understand core concepts easily. A set of stepwise instructions with Maithili language voiceover can help them learn how to setup labs and execute programs themselves.
This can be supplemented by using remote instructors / programmers doing review sessions virtually. A community of programmers, software developers, teachers who are interested in “giving back” and ready to host fortnightly / monthly classes can be a significant attraction and value creator for the children to “fall in love’ with programming.
Online tools and community can also be used to train existing teachers, parents and elders interested in the “movement” to pick up skills so that they themselves can also teach / train younger children.
Projects that Students/Learners can Work on
All programming courses have programming tasks, problem solving across basic concepts and practice problems. These help the students understand the concepts, run labs and real-life tools and understand the logic of computer programming.
For next level, students need to be given some real world like problems to build simple solutions — website, web-apps, mobile apps etc. For these, the community of industry professionals can create a list of projects that can be published, and students / learners can work on them to learn next level skills.
At the top end are internships where college students / graduates get to work on latest business-related problems / needs. These are usually longer duration projects and are reviewed and mentored by industry experts to deliver either innovation or ad-hoc work required by companies.
Mechanisms to Review and Grade Students
There are many automated tools now to review the code produced by students / learners and rated. If one can build a large enough community that is keen to “give back” a platform can be developed to farm out the review / feedback and use the power of the crowd to scale the same.
Software Development and IT enabled service providers
While pilot seeding of schools and colleges can be done, true adoption at scale will happen once there are well paying jobs for the youth who show good talent, skill and application of the programming / coding skills and other IT enabled jobs.
I have argued that the biggest reason for the spread of Sanskrit learning in the region was the economic and social mobility attached to learning Sanskrit. For computer programming to achieve the same social acceptance, it will have to demonstrate that mastery of the skill / subject will lead to economic gains leading to social stature.
How Can We Execute on This Vision?
Cloud-based Computer Labs
Cloud-based computer labs that can support middle school, high school, college and university education are already available. All we need is to find the bootstrap funds for a pilot, the long-term funding model to get going.
We can begin by choosing the high schools in Mithila that were once famous for the quality of education they provided. Known as the foundry of IAS/IPS and other top officers, many such schools are famous across Mithila.
Teachers / Instructors / Courses availability at Village level
One small step to build a central repository of programming courses using Maithili language instruction using the work done by the “Spoken Tutorial” project at IIT Mumbai has been started in this direction.
The “Spoken Tutorial” team has created video lectures for 1000+ programming courses that have been used to train million+ students already. These courses have also been dubbed in many regional languages. However, the team could not add Maithili to the collection.
The teams at Mithila Angel Network (mithilaangels.com) and CSTS (csts.org.in) have started a pilot to translate the audio scripts into Maithili using a large network of Maithili speakers and linguists and then recording the audio in Maithili. The IIT Mumbai team will then add the Maithili language to the video and thus a large library of programming courses suitable for use across middle schools, high schools, and colleges/universities can be created. While some may argue that the same could be done with Hindi audio, the power of the mother tongue to attract curiosity is much higher. Also, this effort will help promote Maithili usage.
Much more needs to be done here. Building even a minimal library of programming courses will need significant funds. Training existing teachers, parents will take resources. Creating new step-by-step courses will take resources. Building a portal that can help build a community of professionals and facilitate 1:1 or Many:1 engagement for online review/learning will take funds and time.
Building a platform that can provide near real-world problems to solve, compute resources to execute and ability to review, rate and mentor the learners will take some doing.
The silver lining is that ‘IT CAN BE DONE.” Of course, it needs a 10 year+ vision and roadmap and determination to see through.
Ecosystem of Software Development & ITES companies
With a functional airport and one of the highest traffic under the Udaan scheme, Darbhanga has finally been connected to the state capitals and Delhi enabling business oriented short trips to the city.
This coupled with the city being an education hub since decades and low-cost lifestyle, Darbhanga is a promising destination for spread of IT/ITES service providers from bigger cities to T2, T3 locations.
Software development, testing, UI/UX design, digital marketing and lead-generation, IT administration, DevOps services, data entry, text processing among others can be done from Darbhanga at a significant cost advantage to T1 cities. [I have written about the capacity development for IT/ITES at Darbhanga here — https://medium.com/@jalajboy/building-software-it-capability-at-darbhanga-db3b40068072]
A small initiative has been taken in this direction as well and a small developer team plus a small digital marketing team has been setup at Darbhanga that is serving ad-hoc programming and business development needs of startups across India, Bihar and offering high quality services at cost advantage. Once the local talent has acquired reasonable experience under its belt, these services can be expanded hugely.
It is also hoped that many of the initial team members will go on to build their own ventures and the success of this venture will inspire other diaspora to look at Darbhanga as an IT/ITES investment destination. Over time, if reasonable number of companies start operating in this field and the talent can find local jobs at attractive compensation, it will kick-off a positive spiral/flywheel with more younger talents taking to programming and using coding skills to move up socially and economically.
10-Year RoadMap
Social change is hard and slow and difficult to come by. It starts slow, very slow. Sometimes it’s not visible at all. And there are many bumps, missed steps, reversals, and multiple failures on the way.
This is why I believe this goal needs a minimum 10-year roadmap with heads down, focused and persistent execution. Here are some initial thoughts on the milestones that could be used as guiding posts. These are not exhaustive and will certainly change as the journey makes progress or falters.
1–2 Year Milestone
· Identify the programming languages that can be used to seed learning across middle schools, high schools, colleges/universities.
· Build the video courses, reading materials, step-by-step videos to facilitate learning.
· Identify the pilot participants — middle schools, high schools, colleges / universities that will kick off this program.
· Build the community platform that can be used by diaspora professionals to connect with students.
· Build project list for each target group — middle school, high school, college / university.
· Build a fund-raising campaign and socialize it. Raise initial corpus.
· Set targets for 1st year — # of courses, # of step-by-step videos, # community members, Corpus size, # schools / colleges in pilot, # of students impacted, # of projects available.
· Build a 3-year plan to grow the pilot to 10% of the target coverage.
· Build 20-people strong IT/ITES operation at Darbhanga serving local, Bihar and national customers. Try for at least 1 export contract.
3 Year Milestone
· Target 25 middle schools, high schools and 50 colleges / universities that will participate in the program. Target 200 students per institution to be covered.
· Target to grow the community platform to 1000 “donors” who will be mentors for the learners.
· Build project list of 200 student projects — 50 for middle school, high school and 150 for college / university.
· Build a program corpus of Rs. 10 cr through crowdfunding, HNI funding, CSR funding and any institutional support. Build dedicated fund raising and financial operations team.
· Build 50-people strong IT/ITES operation at Darbhanga serving local, Bihar and national customers. Try for at least 3 full time dedicated export contracts.
· Track and measure the number of engg graduates who have learnt the coding courses and taken the final assessment examination. Track and measure number of them getting placed in software jobs in the country, outside and within Mithila.
· Track and measure the PR/press impact of the campaign.
5 Year Milestone
· Target 30% coverage across middle schools, high schools and 50% coverage across colleges / universities for participation in the program. Target 200 students per institution to be covered.
· Target to grow the community platform to 5000 “donors” who will be mentors for the learners.
· Build project list of 200 student projects — 50 for middle school, high school and 150 for college / university.
· Build a program corpus of Rs. 25 cr through crowdfunding, HNI funding, CSR funding and any institutional support. Build dedicated fund raising and financial operations team.
· Build 50-people strong IT/ITES operation at Darbhanga serving local, Bihar and national customers. Try for at least 3 full time dedicated export contracts.
· Inspire and motivate 10 IT/ITES companies to work out of Mithila region and absorb the local youth in programming and software jobs.
· Track and measure the number of engg graduates who have learnt the coding courses and taken the final assessment examination. Track and measure number of them getting placed in software jobs in the country, outside and within Mithila.
· Track and measure the PR/press impact of the campaign.
10 Year Milestone
· Target 50% coverage across middle schools, high schools and 60% coverage across colleges / universities for participation in the program. Target 200 students per institution to be covered.
· Target to grow the community platform to 10,000 “donors” who will be mentors for the learners.
· Build project list of 500 student projects — 200 for middle school, high school and 300 for college / university.
· Build a program corpus of Rs. 100 cr through crowdfunding, HNI funding, CSR funding and any institutional support. Build dedicated fund raising and financial operations team. Build content creation, school/college onboarding, field review teams.
· Build 200-people strong IT/ITES operation at Darbhanga serving local, Bihar and national customers. Try for at least 10 full time dedicated export contracts.
· Inspire and motivate 25 IT/ITES companies to work out of Mithila region and absorb the local youth in programming and software jobs.
· Track and measure the number of engg graduates who have learnt the coding courses and taken the final assessment examination. Track and measure number of them getting placed in software jobs in the country, outside and within Mithila.
· Track and measure the PR/press impact of the campaign.
