Education ministers arrive in Gujarat for two-day conference

Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan and education ministers from states and Union Territories arrived in Gujarat’s Gandhinagar city on Wednesday to take part in the two-day National Education Ministers' Conference.

While the conference will take place at Mahatma Mandir, a convention centre in Gandhinagar, on Thursday, Pradhan along with education ministers of different states and UTs, including Delhi minister Manish Sisodia, will visit different institutions during the day, an official release stated.

After their arrival, Pradhan and others, accompanied by Gujarat Minister Jitu Vaghani, visited Vidya Samiksha Kendra (VSK), a command-and-control centre for monitoring activities of schools in Gandhinagar, it said.

VSK is essentially a surveillance system that monitors enrolment, attendance, drop-out ratio in schools and also keeps tabs on activities and performance of teachers and their supervising staff.

The delegation then went to city-based Bhaskaracharya National Institute for Space Applications and Geo-informatics or BISAG, a state-level agency that provides services and solutions in implementing map-based GeoSpatial Information Systems.

Among other things, BISAG's satellite communication network is utilised by the state government to provide online education, the release said.

Later in the day, the delegation will visit the campuses of National Forensic Science University (NFSU) and International Automobile Centre of Excellence (iACE), it was stated.