Photo: CADIP

In Tasharpu area of Dhading, Himalayan Children Charity had connected government schools to the internet. The connection was made a year ago and was still in a test phase but it was helping more than thousands of student get into the world of internet. No wonder that it would be the talk of the town. Another high school about 10 km further came to know about it and wanted to connect to the global village of communication. They lined up all their 750 students to form a human gate and made them clap as the founders and representatives of charity walked into the school premise. No sooner the representatives could admire the appraisal of welcome ceremony, it turned into a sad story. The school had only five computers and a computer was to be shared among 15 students. How can fifteen students share a computer? Lack of computer is a major problem in almost all the government school of the country but here they did not even have a single teacher who could teach them to work on the internet. The Internet must be a vast term for students and teacher there as they are deprived of basic knowledge of computer operation. With government forcefully squeezing computer as a mandatory subject in school’s curriculum, it failed to carry out homework on available means and resources and their distribution. This has resulted in computer subject to be a major flop in government schools. There are schools with abundant computers in laboratory mostly received as a donation, but they never come into use. These machines have been sitting there in the locked room for years and years and collecting dust. The teachers are scared to let the students use them in a fear of getting them spoiled while students do not want to take the risk. When trekking in the upper Himalayan region of the country, the scenario was even worst. There would be people gathering around the table to have a glance of a laptop when some foreigners were using them to carry out their work. There would be pushing and knocking in the crowd to have a view. Their talks, gestures, and amazement could easily tell that they were seeing it for the very first time. This tells us the technological gap that lies with the people of our country. When the people of urban areas are working hard to get their kids off from the computer, these people fight to get a sight of a computer. When we say next time that we are in the age of computers, it would be better for us to visualize these scenes in our mind and question “Am I still correct?”