As part of the Prime Minister's Digital India programme, the government has launched a new portal for students to download school books and ebooks. According to a release by the ministry of human resources and development, the initiative called e-Basta is a portal where authorized school teachers can access the portal to compile course material and textbooks, and e-books as per a school's preferences for each class. The portal was jointly developed with the Department of Electronics and Information Technology's Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC). Resources on the portal may be free or priced, and user will be charged for priced resources upon download, the release added . "The e-basta can be made to suit the prescribed books/resources of schools as per the syllabus of their school board or school specific requirements," the release added. The portal currently holds 329 textbooks from the NCERT for classes 1 to 12 and the ebooks are available in Hindi, English, Urdu and Sanskrit. It also shows that a few schools have started posting syllabi and course material on the website for students to download onto tablets. e-basta app: The C-DAC has also developed an application which can run on any Android tablet which can access the syllabi and resources from the portal. The content considered by the app is as defined by the teacher/ school in the eBasta structure, irrespective of what resources are on the SD card. How it works - For students : Students come to the portal to download a prescribed a syllabus or explore other resources and contents available on…
