Karaoke for social and cultural change

Prior to 1996, Indian education policy focused more on equity through access, making some significant strides. By 1987, the Indian government had set up 530,000 primary schools, providing access to 95 percent of the young population across 80 percent of villages (NCERT, 1992, p. 42) In spite of this success, India faces significant challenges in attendance, retention and dropout rates: about 20 percent of children enrolled do not attend school regularly and about 40 percent of those who enroll drop out before completing the primary cycle. When accounting for gender, caste and class, the disparity is more alarming (p.94). Hence, the idea of quality centeredness in education gained serious momentum, highlighting several concerns, one being that of production and distribution of educational content (p.133). According to the World Bank India education sector reports (1996; 2001), textbooks, reputed to be of poor physical quality and readability, are often the sole available reading material for most students. Around the same time, there has been international pressure to make educational content more engaging and relevant to the local populace for creating better-prepared future citizens (OECD, 2001). This raises key challenges in the Indian education arena, with a focus on reducing the gap in education outcomes across states and amongst groups through meaningful content. Meanwhile, the reputation of India as the IT hub has energized some of the state governments, especially in the South of India, to promise e-literacy to its people by 2015 (Biswas, 2004). This is being done to reduce the digital divide as well as to adhere to the Info, Comm & Ethics in Society (2006) 3: 121-130 © 2006 Troubador Publishing Ltd.