Field notes · Education
What 80,000 classroom panels taught us about state-scale rollouts
Installing a panel takes an hour. Making sure it is still being used a year later takes planning that starts long before the truck arrives.
Between programmes in Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat, Chhattisgarh, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, Rajasthan and others, our teams have installed more than 80,000 interactive flat panels in government classrooms. Each programme had its own tender, timeline and department. The lessons, though, kept repeating.
1. The site survey decides the schedule
At a few hundred schools you can solve problems as you find them. At several thousand, every surprise multiplies. Walls that cannot take a mount, sockets far from the board, power that cuts out during the school day: each one stops an installation team and pushes back the next school on the route.
We now treat the survey as its own phase, with its own checklist and sign-off, before a single panel leaves the warehouse.
2. Stage everything centrally
Panels that arrive at a school ready to use install faster and fail less. That means unboxing, testing, loading content and labelling each unit before dispatch, so the field team's job on site is mounting, connecting and handing over.
3. Training is part of delivery
A panel that teachers do not use is a large screen on a wall. Handover at each school should include time with the teachers who will use it, covering the basics and the content that came with it. Departments are right to ask for training as a contract deliverable, with attendance recorded.
4. District schools need the same support as city schools
The hardest schools to support are the ones furthest from a service centre. Response times written into the contract have to be achievable there, which means planning spares and engineer coverage district by district rather than state by state.
5. Report what the department needs to see
Education departments are accountable for these programmes long after installation. Regular, simple reports on installed units, open faults and resolution times make that accountability easier, and make it easier to renew the contract.
None of this is complicated. It just has to be done every time, at every school.