Under this collaboration, Oracle will help the Union education ministry use DIKSHA to provide educational resources to students, teachers and collaborators.

SUMMARY

To modernise and scale India’s free education tech platform DIKSHA, that serves over 200 million students, the Union Ministry of Education has migrated the platform to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. The ministry and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure have entered into a multi-year collaboration agreement. Under this collaboration, Oracle will help the education ministry use DIKSHA to provide educational resources to millions of additional students, teachers and collaborators across India. Migration to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure will help the education ministry scale for DIKSHA 2.0 and lower the IT cost. 

Since moving to OCI, DIKSHA has gained greater scalability, security, cost effectiveness, and the ability to adjust capacity based on demand, enabling DIKSHA to deliver more content and serve more students and teachers as the platform grows.

“Education is an important pillar for economic development, and India’s knowledge economy continues to be one of the largest in the world. We need to embrace modern tools and technology to make education more easily available and securely accessible to everyone,” said Indu Kumar, Head of Department, ICT and Training, Central Institute of Educational Technology (CIET), National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT), Ministry of Education, Government of India.

DIKSHA is one of India’s largest and most successful digital public infrastructure (DPI) initiatives, which was developed for school education and foundational learning programmes. The platform supports 1.48 million schools across all of India’s 35 states and Union Territories and is available in 36 Indian languages. Using the open-source platform Sunbird, developed by the EkStep Foundation, DIKSHA helps teachers support inclusive learning for communities of underserved and disabled learners across the country. 

More than 200 million students and 7 million teachers from government and private schools access content from more than 11,000 contributors. Users of the platform stream 1.2 petabytes of text and video content per day from sources such as the National Council of Educational Research & Training (NCERT), Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) and State Council of Educational Research and Training (SCERTs). 

With the massive scale of the DIKSHA platform, DIKSHA generates a huge number of logs for which they run Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana (ELK stack) for application diagnosis, performance, analytics and dashboards. OCI Compute VMs and OCI Storage help manage DIKSHA’s workload and store application content such as PDFs, videos and webpages as well as performance logs. For the massive scale is the platform, India’s Ministry of Education needed a cloud service provider that is well equipped to handle the processing, storage and distribution of large amounts of data in a variety of formats. To aid this continuous development and management of the DIKSHA application, many of its microservices run on Oracle’s Kubernetes clusters in OCI Container Engine for Kubernetes (OKE) and container images are stored in OCI Container Registry. Additionally, OCI Media Flow and OCI Media Streams help make it easier for users to access the nearly 1.5 million videos on the platform by processing and storing video content in the right formats and resolutions to meet the users’ needs.

“As one of the largest free education platforms in the world, DIKSHA is an excellent example of the ‘made in India and made for India’ campaign,” said Shailender Kumar, senior vice president and regional managing director, Oracle India and NetSuite Asia Pacific and Japan. “Oracle is well-positioned to help institutions adapt to changing student demands in the new digital era and be more flexible in educating students of different needs. Our next generation cloud perfectly aligns with DIKSHA’s goals because of its ability to provide scalability and elasticity while running applications faster, more securely, and more efficiently.”

The DIKSHA migration project is being implemented by two Oracle PartnerNetwork members, Bharti Airtel and Trigyn Technologies. DIKSHA will be deployed in the Oracle Cloud Mumbai region.