The World Bank and Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) will provide a loan of Rs 7,500 crore for the Gujarat government's Mission School of Excellence project that aims to improve the quality of education in the state, an official said on Tuesday. Under the Mission School of Excellence project, the state government will spend Rs 10,000 crore in the next five years and cover all 35,133 government and 5,847 grant-in-aid schools in the state. The funds will be spent on building 50,000 new classrooms, creating 1.5 lakh smart classrooms, 20,000 new computer labs and 5,000 tinkering labs in 41,000-odd government and grant-in-aid schools across the state. It is estimated that nearly one crore school students will benefit directly from this ambitious project in the next five years.
As per an official release, the World Bank and AIIB have approved a loan of Rs 7,500 crore for the ambitious project. A delegation from the World Bank on Tuesday visited Gandhinagar to study the School of Excellence project. The delegation, led by the bank's Global Education Director Jaime Saavedra also visited the state education department's command and control centre in the state capital, the release said. The delegation wanted to study these "Gujarat model initiatives" to check if they can be declared as "global best practices", it was stated. The recently launched command and control centre is an interactive platform used by the education department to monitor the attendance of students and teachers, keep an eye on the quality of education and to provide e-learning projects to the schools, it said.
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