In April 2025, Asha Chennai had its teachers going to Middle, High and Higher Secondary schools do a basic infrastructure survey of the facilities available at the schools. This report captures the information from this survey.
Infrastructure Assessment Report
By Rajaram (April 2025)
In April 2025, Asha Chennai had its teachers going to Middle, High and Higher Secondary schools do a basic infrastructure survey of the facilities available at the schools. This report captures the information from this survey.
Background
The government has been setting up HighTech labs in all high and higher secondary schools. Starting this year, there have been talk (and action) of setting up HighTech labs in all middle schools as well. Through our various programs our teachers regularly visit a few hundred of these schools to teach computer science. We had our teachers collect details about these schools. Here are some general details before we talk about the specifics from the survey.
Government has been setting up HighTech labs at High (6th to 10th stds) and Higher Secondary (6th to 12th) schools. Almost all the High and Higher Secondary schools have a HighTech lab. These were installed sometime in the 2023-24 academic year. Therefore, these labs are about 1.5 years old at the time of this report.
They have announced that these will be setup at all Middle (1st to 8th) as well by the end of the year. Here is some general information about the HighTech labs.
HighTech Labs – Infrastructure
These typically comprise of one server and ‘N’ clients. Most of the ones we have seen come with 10 or 20 clients. The clients and the server are connected through a wired LAN. The thinclients do not have any persistent storage. Then cross mount filesystems from the server and boot from that. The server has persistent storage which is shared across the clients. All of these run versions of the BOSS Linux which is a distribution of Linux developed by Indian government.
The software available on the servers seem to be controlled through some central command based in Chennai with little or no control at the school level. The schools do not have root access to the servers and therefore cannot install any new applications or make any other changes to the server.
Wired broadband connection comes to the HighTech lab and all the clients and the server can connect to the Internet. The server also has a projector and a printer connected to it. Backup power is provided to all these machines using a UPS. Sufficient chairs, tables benches etc. are also provided at the HighTech labs.
HighTech Labs – System Configuration
The servers at the HighTech labs all have the following configuration.
Processor Intel Xeon(R)CPUE1220V6@3.00H2x4
Memory 15.5GiB
Disk 966.2GB
And the clients have the following configuration.
Processor Intel celeron(R)CPUJi800@2.41GHz*2
Memory 1.8GiB
Disk 5.8GB
It looks like both the processors are quite old (more than a decade) but the HighTech labs were installed just a little more than a year back.
The clients have a 18” screen, an audio jack and a USB.
HighTech Labs – Maintenance
The main problem with the HighTech labs seem to be with the maintenance. We have often seen schools with problems which do not get addressed for months and months. There seems to be some mechanism to maintain it at each district but it is not functioning too well especially at remote schools. Further the local teachers do not seem to be confident in maintaining the system. Sometimes the Cross mounted storage is not visible in some clients. It is not clear if local troubleshooting can be done to fix these simple problems. Common problems are,
- Storage doesn’t work.
- Some clients do not start properly.
- Network doesn’t work.
- UPS power backup doesn’t work.
Many of the Higher Secondary schools have a dedicated Computer Science teacher who handles the CS and IT courses for the 11th and 12th standards. Occasionally schools also have a part time computer teacher typically to teach computer science for classes 6 to 10. Some bigger middle schools also have these part-time computer teachers. Besides these many of the schools these days have a staff appointed by Keltron (funded by the government but program implemented by Keltron). These staff’s responsibility is largely administrative. They help the teachers in this schools as well as primary schools around this school in entering various data required by the government (EMIS data for enrolment and attendance, creating Aadhaar cards for the students, marking curriculum progress in various subjects etc.). These teachers together usually are responsible for the HighTech lab.
HighTech Labs – Usage
Another major problem with the HighTech labs is that these are heavily used. Two major uses of the HighTech labs are for taking various tests especially for classes 10 to 12, and for a language laboratory program which gives them English listening practice over the computer. Oddly 11th and 12th std Computer stream students do not seem to be using the lab as much as we thought they would.
In bigger schools with multipe sections for each class, often scheduling the HighTech lab is a problem. Also because it is required for various programs run by the Education department itself, they are afraid to give it to an external organisation like Asha. If there are problems in the lab, the government programs will then suffer.
Another minor problem is the in some schools the furniture is chairs which makes it awkward for multiple children to be using these systems at the same time. Benches would make that mode of usage easier. And with 10 or 20 clients in the lab, one terminal per student is also not feasible in most classes.
Survey Findings
The survey was conducted in Middle, High and Higher Secondary schools that are served by Asha. A total of 241 schools were surveyed.
Availability and Functioning of the Labs
As of the end of 2024-25, HighTech labs were not available in any of the middle schools. At high and higher secondary schools’ labs were available in all but one high school and were for most part functioning. However, in about 85% of the schools with no HighTech lab, a new lab is expected by the new academic year. In all these school some work related to the most of the HighTech labs had either 10 clients or 20 clients. Some 4 schools alone had a 15 client configuration. As per the teachers’ subjective report, the labs were functioning about 93.7% of the time and about 95.1% of the clients were functioning.
Power Situation
We did not collect data on how frequent power cuts are at the various schools. But anecdotally we know that there will be at least half a school day of power cuts in a week during any one of the days. Here is the information on the availability of UPS backup for the HighTech labs.
Again anecdotally, the UPS batteries are often not maintained properly and the power backup provided by the UPS varies widely. They usually have between 1 and 2 hours of backup power.
Broadband at the School
Even without the HighTech labs, most of the schools have been provided by a broadband connection. But sometimes the broadband connection is not functional.
Our teachers also measured the upload a download speed of the network at each school. Note that this was just done one time during school hours at each school. Therefore it is not intended to be an accurate measurement.
Median Download Speed 53 Mbps
Median Upload Speed 50.48 Mbps
There is a wide range of values here ranging from under 1 mbps to 300 mbps!
Other Computers at the Schools
For most part the HighTech labs are the only computer facilities at government schools. The following chart shows other computer facilities at the school. However as these are schools supported by Asha, we have donated computers to the schools which is shown in the second chart.
A lot of the schools conduct our CS education programs using computers donated by Asha.
Computer Teachers at the Schools and Usage of the Labs
Availability of the lab doesn’t always mean that we can use the lab for teaching computer science. HighTech labs are used for spoken English lessons, for practice tests for all classes etc. We asked the teachers how easy it is to get the HighTech lab for teaching their Computer Science classes. Note this was done with the 97 schools with functional HighTech labs.
As you can see at about 38% of the school it is impossible or difficult to get the labs!
And what about teachers to teach computer science. Here is information on the availability of computer teachers at the schools.
Fulltime computer teachers are almost exclusively available only at Higher Secondary schools. This is because Computer Science as a stream has been available for 11th and 12th std students for several decades now in Tamilnadu. Even parttime computer teachers are also mostly available at Higher Secondary schools. Few are available at High schools and even fewer at middle schools.
In Conclusion
HighTech labs are recent additions and a step in the right direction. Given that all these schools had no computers before this, this represents a huge progress in the infrastructure at the schools. All High and Higher Secondary schools have these labs and all middle schools should be getting one shortly. It provides a platform for launching a Computer Science program at the schools. In bigger schools getting the time of the HighTech lab is a challenge. Government has plans of providing these schools with multiple HighTech labs. We are not sure when this may happen.
For now, Asha approach (thanks to tremendous support from Amazon) has been to provide these schools with some computers of our own whenever the HighTech labs systems are not usable/available. While the number of computers provided is still small (4 computers including the teacher’s for a class of 30), we also hope to keep improving on this.
As Asha has been doing, the CS curriculum at these schools will need to work with multiple students sitting at a single computer. Even in the best of circumstances we are still looking at 2 students per computer.
The power situation at the schools also means that laptops or tablets with their own batteries are probably a better solution than desktop computers (like the HighTech labs). Further the network availability also poses a challenge. This is also improving significantly over time and may soon not be an issue. For now Asha relies on locally available contents. But inability to install new software on HighTech lab systems has posed a challenge for us.
Finally in terms of teachers, full-time computer teachers are typically available only at Higher Secondary Schools and these teachers time is typically not available to teach 6th to 9th std students as we have been aiming. Even part-time computer teachers are not present in most middle and high schools. Therefore, Asha has been focussing on training and brining on board other subject teachers. Where available we have also been able to effectively work with the parttime computer teachers.