Indus Action is a non-profit organization that has been working in the space of policy implementation in India since 2012. They have been working closely on the implementation of the Right to Education across various states and Union Territories in India with the help of the respective governments and the Education Ministry.
Think201 was approached towards the end of 2017 to develop a flexible and customizable system that allows online registration of unaided private and special category schools and students belonging to economically weaker or socially disadvantaged sections of society.
The system allows schools to register and define their neighborhood areas and respective schools region-wise (such as ward, mohalla, locality, and so on). Similarly, it allows students to register and select their preferred schools using a lottery algorithm that allots students to their preferred schools.
In less than 4 months, we were able to deploy a system with multiple user roles, such as school admins, nodal admins, district admins, and state admins, to allow coordination among different stakeholders from grassroots levels to the state administrative level. We considered the inputs from the report “State of the Nation: RTE Section 12(1)(c) 2017” published by IIM Ahmedabad. The Govt. of Uttarakhand has been very cooperative with the Indus Action team in the implementation of the online system to amplify the impact of RTE.
After the deployment of the RTE system in Uttarakhand in the month of early April, about 600 schools onboarded themselves in the system, and within 24 hours of the student registration kickstart, over 1000 students registered themselves without a hassle.