A Smart Turn in Valley

In a region known for its serenity and strife, digital boards are bringing lessons to life, and offering students a new way forward.

- Dr Waseem Ahmad

In Budgam, on a winter morning when frost clung to the windows and boots squeaked on school floors, a seventh-grade student sat still, eyes wide. A digital board flickered on. On it, clouds formed, climbed, and rained. "Before this," he said later, "I could only imagine it. Now I can see it happening.

That small moment held something bigger. It showed how classrooms in Jammu and Kashmir are changing, and why that matters.

Across this region, where education has often meant makeshift arrangements, old books, and missed school days, there's a silent push to bring in digital learning. Over the past two years, hundreds of government schools have been equipped with digital boards. They've arrived in far-flung areas like Kupwara, Poonch, and Leh.

Some schools, long cut off from resources and training, are now watching animations, streaming poetry, and practicing pronunciation with real-time feedback.

It’s a big shift. And it’s being driven by national and local schemes like Samagra Shiksha and Digital India. The aim: to modernise education, especially in places that have seen more struggle than support.

Teachers, too, are adapting. In Baramulla, one showed me how he used the board to simulate a lab experiment. “We don't have proper lab space,” he said, “but this lets me show how things work.” Another teacher in Anantnag said student attendance had improved since the screen came in. “They don't want to miss class now,” he smiled.