Tabs for students: Education Ministry to go ahead with less Tabs
The Education Ministry had decided to go ahead with a part of the proposed project of providing Tabs for students, but will be scrapping the rest of the project on the grounds it was a waste of money.
Out of the 200,000 Tabs ordered from China the Ministry will buy only 96,919 Tabs. A senior ministry official said agreements have been signed for this to take place, while the rest of the order will be cancelled. The cost of the 96,919 tabs will be around Rs three billion.
Since the agreement had been signed the ministry was not in a position to cancel the order as the assembling process had begun and the required charging racks had already been dispatched to Sri Lanka, the official said.
If the agreement was withdrawn, the government would lose the tabs and would have to pay a penalty for the cancellation, he added.
“We had no other option, and we were compelled to go ahead with buying a part of the order,” he said.
The Ministry hopes to submit two proposals on the distribution of these tabs. One of them will about the distribution of Tabs to 1300 schools which do not have desktop computers or laptops, so these schools could substitute Tabs for a computer lab. The other proposal will about the distribution of Tabs to National schools and teachers who are being trained.
Students will not be able to take the Tabs home, and the estimated usage period is around three years.
The Education Ministry has not made plans to continue with the project thereafter.
The Ministry hopes to send a team to China after the Coronavirus issue is resolved, to check and approve the Tabs Sri Lanka will be buying.
The original proposal to provide Tabs to schools was proposed by the 2015 UNF Government to meet an election promise. But due to issues raised by former President Maithripala Sirisena, the Government could not go ahead with the project.
The former President rejected the project claiming it was too expensive, and not useful for students. He also said they could be misused. But former Education Minister Akila Virja Kariyawasam strongly defended the project saying Tabs would be useful for digital learning. - DW