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motors, growing and selling poultry and vegetables, making and selling food products, doing blood group tests etc.) During the learning period, he gets a stipend for training the students, which gives him some sustenance. He also earns through the services he provides. This varies from 100-200 to some earning beyond 1000 p.m. in addition to the stipend. When the instructor has enough experience of his business, he leaves the instructor job and we help him to get a bank loan and start his own enterprise. • A new instructor takes his place. The school is thus not only giving skill training to school students, but also giving enterprise training to out-of-school youth and helping them to start own enterprises. This is our Trainee Entrepreneur Scheme. 3. 'Virtual Visit' and Feed back system. • The feed back system is as important to a project as eyes are to a human being. It increases speed of progress and avoids errors before they become too expensive. It is also useful in distant training and for inspection to see the truth. • We visualise 'roving monitors' with a handheld computer, a web cam and a mobile phone, linked to each other and the Internet. This combination can take interviews, visit work places, have question-answer sessions; virtually anything one can do during a field visit. A roving monitor will visit the designated place and the expert will have a dialogue from his office, through the Internet. Any other school can also watch if they are interested. We have not been able to test this system, because we do not have the connectivity to Internet from our village yet. But we are ready to start and have got rough estimates and the cost of the set up will be approx. Rs 50,000. We expect that such a roving monitor could be an independent vocation, financed by banks to people with journalistic qualities. They will carry out visits to schools for a fee. Other times, they Rural Development Through Education System 111
