Thiruvananthapuram: Schools buying IT equipment should ensure that they have five year warranty and should install IT@school edu package consisting of free software operating system, office, multimedia, education software and e-resources in the computer. The new guidelines, issued by a committee headed by Prof. G. Jayashankar and IT@school executive director K. Anvar Sadath as member, say the price of desk tops including operating system, various packages and tax should not exceed '24,830 while that for a laptop should be less than Rs 28,990.
Apart from the computer, the battery of the laptop, power adaptor and projector blub should also have five year warranty. The distributors of the IT equipment should provide call centres and web portal for reporting complaints for five years. The complaints should be attended within two days and rectified within five days. Otherwise the distributors should pay Rs 100 fine per day for the delay, the guidelines said.
The new guidelines were issued on the background of the Hi-tech school programme being proposed to be implemented in classes VIII to XII in all government and aided schools. Under the high-tech programme, all classrooms will be equipped with computers, multimedia projector, sound system and high speed internet connection. Every school will also have offline servers hosting educational contents for classrooms. Free and open source software-based resources will be provided to all schools.
