India's Ministry of Education Chooses Oracle Cloud for Edtech Platform DIKSHA

Oracle announced that India’s Ministry of Education has chosen Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) to modernize the country’s national education technology platform ‘Digital Infrastructure for Knowledge Sharing’ (DIKSHA). This migration will help make the Edtech platform DIKSHA more accessible and lower its IT costs. The platform supports 1.48 million schools across all of India’s 35 states and union territories and is available in 36 Indian languages. Under the multi-year collaboration agreement, OCI will help the Ministry of Education use DIKSHA to provide educational resources to millions of additional students, teachers, and collaborators across India.

DIKSHA is an Indian initiative that uses Sunbird to provide inclusive learning for underserved and disabled learners. It reaches over 200 million students and 7 million teachers from both government and private schools, streaming 1.2 petabytes of content daily. Since moving to OCI, it has improved scalability, security, and cost-effectiveness.

“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 Dr. 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.

“Migrating DIKSHA to OCI will play a key role in elevating India’s learning system. DIKSHA supports India’s DPI initiatives in the education field and is powering population-scale deployments, which can be challenging in a diverse country like India,” said Nandan Nilekeni, co-founder and chairperson, EkStep Foundation. “This collaboration is a significant milestone in our journey towards realizing Digital India in the age of AI and could be well emulated around the world.”

The Ministry of Education in India required a cloud service provider capable of handling large amounts of data in various formats for their DIKSHA platform. OCI was chosen due to its ability to process, store, and distribute data on a massive scale. It generates numerous logs that are analyzed using Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana (ELK stack) for performance, application diagnosis, analytics, and dashboards. OCI Compute VMs and OCI Storage are utilized to manage DIKSHA’s workload and store application content, including PDFs, videos, webpages, and performance logs.

To facilitate the continuous development and management of the Edtech platform DIKSHA application, many of its microservices operate on 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 users access the platform's almost 1.5 million videos by processing and storing video content in the appropriate formats and resolutions to meet their 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.