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EMRC, 50 Circus Avenue, Kolkata 700 017. Ph. 91-33-22874869 Fax. 91-33-2289-1373
EMRC St. Xavier’s College, Kolkata is part of a large family of EMRCs spread across India. This family has in fact 18 members, including the head office at New Delhi. The other members are at Srinagar, Roorkee, Patiala, Jodhpur, New Delhi, Ahmedabad, Indore, Sagar, Imphal, Pune, Mysore, Chennai, Madurai, Calicut and two at Hyderabad.
All the centres come under the purview of the university of that particular place. In Hyderabad one is with the Central Institute for English and Foreign Languages (CIEFL) and the other is with Osmania University. It is only the Kolkata EMRC that comes under the purview of St. Xavier’s college.
All funding – both for running expenses and equipment – comes from the University Grants Commission. The coordination of production, telecast and other programme related affairs is done by the Consortium for Educational Communication (CEC), New Delhi. The administration is done by the host university/college.
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History
Educational Multimedia Research Centre, St. Xavier’s Autonomous College, Calcutta was established by the University Grants Commission in 1986. Production started in 1987 with a set of equipment and a skeletal staff of six persons.
Objective
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The programmes had a definite purpose. They were meant to update, upgrade and enrich the educational scenario in the country. This was essential because there is a lot of disparity between the education imparted in the rural areas of India and that in the cities. For example in the cities educational institutions have adequate facilities – libraries, laboratories and teachers; but they are a far cry in the villages. It is not possible to bring the rural students to the cities. But if one can take some of the urban facilities to the rural areas through television, it would benefit a large number of rural students. This was the basic objective of University Grants Commission behind the setting up educational programme production centres. These programmes were not meant to replace the classroom and the teachers. These programmes were not meant to reproduce the textbooks in a video format. They were meant to go beyond the textbooks, to update, upgrade and enrich the teachers and students. They were meant to be programmes with a multidisciplinary approach.
The Mechanism
India is a vast country with a multi-cultural population. Education cannot happen without reference to the culture. So one production centre, no matter where it is situated, producing programmes for the whole of India will not be able to cater to the cultural diversity. Therefore over a period of time 17 centres were set up with a view to addressing the cultural differences and also to bringing about variety to the programmes. Ten of these are AVRCs and six are EMRCs. One is known as MCRC which includes, besides production, teaching as well. All the centres with the exception of EMRC Calcutta are within the administrative ambit of Universities. EMRC Calcutta comes under St. Xavier’s College.
All the centres produce programmes and send them to a coordinating office, called Consortium for Educational Communication (CEC) in New Delhi. The programmes received from the different centres are combined to make capsules as per requirement of telecast. CEC also previews the programmes and sends quality report to respective media centres.
CEC conducts occasional meetings of the directors of all the centres to coordinate and orchestrate production so that repetitions are avoided. In addition to this, occasional trainings for various categories of the staff of media centres are conducted by CEC. |
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