Airtel to offer content delivery services to govt’s digital education platform DIKSHA

Telecommunication service provider Bharti Airtel has been selected by the Ministry of Education (MoE) for end-to-end management of Digital Infrastructure for Knowledge Sharing (DIKSHA). The Digital India Corporation (under MoE) has given Airtel the cloud and content delivery network (CDN) mandate for DIKSHA’s online platforms across its mobile application and website.

DIKSHA is a national platform for open education digital content platform that provides quality e-content in the form of e-textbooks and audiobooks for free to all teachers and students across the country. DIKSHA will tap on Airtel’s  ‘low latency and high-bandwidth Edge CDN solution’ to deliver content to students in 28 states and eight Union Territories. 

The DIKSHA application and website will be powered by Airtel Cloud to make it accessible to students across the country in their preferred Indian language. Airtel Cloud will also lead the migration of DIKSHA to Oracle Cloud and offer managed services along with CDN solutions.

“DIKSHA offers 9300+ courses in 35+ Indian languages and has witnessed 50+ billion learning sessions and 60+ billion minutes of usage by students, making it one of the largest free education platforms in the world. We are thrilled to partner with the Ministry of Education to bolster this crucial education infrastructure and advance its accessibility to millions of children across the country with our state-of-the-art cloud and CDN services,” said Praveen Agarwal, head (government business), Airtel Business.

Further, Ganesh Lakshminarayanan, the CEO of Airtel’s cloud segment told TechCircle that Airtel’s large market share and mobility will support the delivery of digital educational content (which includes text, audio, and video) to students across the country. “The whole DIKSHA project is about the digital distribution of the textbooks, of which the CDN network is a reliable component for ensuring low latency and no error rate,” said Lakshminarayanan. 

DIKSHA was founded in 2017 and during the pandemic era (between 2020 and 2022), the platform became the primary platform for online education. As per a January 2023 report by Wired, an unsecured cloud server hosted on Microsoft Azure allegedly ‘exposing millions of individuals’ data’. Following the news, the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) said that it would initiate a third-party security audit of DIKSHA.