TechFocus
A perpetual guiding light
Four-year-old 'Dishari' continues to spread the IT-spell among rural populace
Saad Hammadi, back from Golora, Manikganj
Regular StarTech readers may recall the story of 'Dishari', published in October 2002, when British American Tobacco Bangladesh (BATB)'s free basic ICT education centre was exposed for the very first time in Chechua, Kushtia. 'Dishari', which started off as a part of BATB's corporate social responsibility (CSR), is running on its fourth year at present and guess what? - This free of cost IT education centre, providing elementary knowledge on computing and couple of Microsoft Office applications had already witnessed 378 students passing out from the four Dishari centres, located in different rural parts of the country, in just about three years.BATB introduced Dishari to provide education on the basics of computing at the rural areas, where people cannot afford to pay for it. What makes their CSR more worthy to the students is, at the end of each academic year, the best student at every centre is given the opportunity to study his chosen course at an IT institution such as, Aptech, NIIT and New Horizons at the expense of BATB. Dishari also provides internship for two months to three of their best students over the year at Dishari's training centres, who also earn Four Thousand Taka during each period of their internship. Akkas, a second year student of Debendra College in Manikganj, majoring in Accounting has excelled with 82 percent success in Dishari's fourth batch at Manikganj and now he wishes to work on Graphics. While visiting this centre along with some fellow journalists, we spoke to Pankaj Kumar Shaha, a student from the present batch. Pankaj, seemed very gratified to Dishari. "Dishari has showed us such a path, which was neither available before nor expected. Here at Dishari, I have been facilitated with computers and applications that I am able learn and practice even after the training hours." Dishari has always been successful in finding 12 students per batch, which is the capacity for every session, without any awareness programme or promotional activities regarding this matter, which may have been able to find them a greater demand and publicity. The course offered by Dishari provides the basic idea of computer knowledge and can assist the students in finding a job when accumulated with their academic studies. Most of the people learning at the centre are still students and young. Dishari's instructor took the pride of informing StarTech, that from particular institution, one student has become successful in getting a job at the Mercantile Co-operative Bank as a computer operator. Having its sixth batch onboard, so far 60 students have successfully passed from Dishari at Manikganj and the sixth one will end this month. The Manikganj centre happens to be the third Dishari centre to be in operation alongside their initial ones at Chechua, Kushtia and Moulvibazar, Sylhet and the most recent one, located at Chokoria, Cox's Bazar.
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Sixth batch of 'Dishari' Manikganj |
