Orissa is the First State in India to Realize the Fundamental Right to Education Thanks to the Success of Project "E-Shishu" Supported by ABBYY FormReaderT

A Multi-Award Winning Project, Funded by the World Bank, is a Step Towards e-Governance in India.
"Thanks to NETSPIDER® INDIA and ABBYY technology we created history by becoming the first state to have embarked into the realm of e-governance in India." (Mr. Pinaki Mohanti, EDP Head, OPEPA)

"Child Census was the first step in our mission for tracking each and every child in Orissa for the SSA program. It would have taken us approximately a year to conduct the door to door census, enter the 7.7 million forms manually and then collate the data. Instead, this mammoth task was taken up by NETSPIDER® INDIA, and using ABBYY software, forms were designed and processed. This reduced our work by 80% and we could conclude the child census data processing activity in just three months. Thanks to NETSPIDER® INDIA and ABBYY technology we created history by becoming the first state to have embarked into the realm of e-governance in India," said Mr. Pinaki Mohanti, EDP Head, OPEPA.

Customer:
Orissa Primary Education Programme Authority (OPEPA), Government of India, Orissa, India.

Project: "e-Shishu":
The goal of the project was to create a database that would track every child in the state of Orissa. The data was to be collected via door-to-door household surveys (estimated to cumulate close to 8 million survey forms) gathering information about all children from birth to age 14 on name, age, education status and other details.

Solution:
NETSPIDER® INDIA proposed ABBYY's acclaimed form processing solution, ABBYY FormReader, for its proven track record of handling Census and other large-scale projects and delivering major time efficiencies and reliability. According to the project's roadmap, forms would be designed and processed with ABBYY FormReader suite, and captured data was to ultimately be gathered in a newly-deployed web-based database. Projected lead time was estimated to be 6 months.

Introduction
The total population of India is 1028.7 million (Census of India 2001) and almost 40% of the population comprises of children within 14 years of age. The number of school-going population is 220 million, out of which 112 million go to formal schools, 7 million to non-formal schools and over 100 million children are out of school. Most of these out-of-school children are engaged in child labor, even with the Government of India having enumerated the Fundamental Right to Education in the constitution of India by the 86th Constitutional Amendment Act. To get all the out-of-school children of the country into the schools by 2010, the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan1 was adopted by the Government of India in all the states. The project was first taken up in the state of Orissa under the patronage of Orissa Primary Education Programme Authority (OPEPA).

Project Background
Orissa, with a total area of approximately 155,000 Sq. Kms and 30 districts, has a population of nearly 40 million (36.8 million as per 2001 Census). It is a state with a high tribal population, and there are great disparities of literacy rates between areas and communities - the lowest being 31% and the highest 80%. According to Orissa Child Census-2005, there were about 600,000 out-of-school children in the state. To comply with the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan and bring each child to school and elevate the primary level educational status in Orissa, the State Government launched the project "e-Shishu" - an electronic program to track every child of the state by means of a unified web-based database.

Manifest Problems Prior to Project "e-Shishu"

1. OPEPA did not have a comprehensive list of names and other information of the out-of-school children.

2. It was complicated for OPEPA to obtain up-to-date information about infrastructure of schools, teachers      posting, etc. from remote locations due to not having a centralized database.
3. There was no general data source to get information on future school entrants.
4. The available statistics on the out-of-school children was approximate and numeric only; thus limiting the      usefulness of the information.

The prescribed course for tracking every child in Orissa entailed millions of door-to-door household surveys followed by scanning, processing, and creating a database - all to be done fairly quickly. Under those circumstances, the OPEPA team had to search for an efficient and powerful software technology which would deliver accurate results in a timely manner. Upon taking part in a limited tender, NETSPIDER® INDIA (NIIL) came out as the winner and was selected to handle this project.

Plan Proposed and Carried out by NETSPIDER® INDIA
To track every child from birth to age 14 in Orissa a door-to-door household survey was conducted in October 2005. The survey was estimated to generate about 7.7 million forms hand-filled in Oriya language. Data from these forms was then to be transferred to machine-readable forms in English language, then processed and exported to server. The NIIL team proposed ABBYY FormReader - a superior form design and data capture technology - to fulfill this immense task.

Process
The door-to-door household surveys were carried out simultaneously in all the 30 districts of the state. This process took 3 weeks and accumulated close to 7.7 million forms with data in Oriya language.
At the post-field stage, ABBYY FormReader was used to create machine-readable forms onto which the data in Oriya was translated to English and transferred. Then, the forms were centrally collected and scanned at a rate of 90 sheets per minute on 5 scanners.

Conclusion
Information gathered from 7.7 million handwritten forms in Oriya language made up the contents of a comprehensive web-based database in English language in slightly over 6 months. NETSPIDER INDIA and their skillful implementation of ABBYY FormReader solution made possible tracking of each and every out-of-school child in the state of Orissa.

OPEPA's comprehensive database of children from birth to age 14

Awards and recognitions
Project "e-Shishu" was one of the first of its kind in the history of e-governance in India which acquired many acclamations and awards. Some of them are listed below:

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