Lahore, January, 2010: The closing ceremony of “Dareecha”
project was arranged by Center for Research in Urdu Language
Processing (CRULP) at FAST-NU Lahore.
National ICT R&D Fund sponsored this ceremony by providing the
cash prizes for this project’s webpage development competition
winners. The aim of the project Dareecha was to explore
sustainable strategies for ICT access and local content
development in rural communities of Pakistan.
CRULP through the PAN Localization Project (www.panl10n.net)
funded by the International Development Research Center (IDRC,
www.idrc.ca), Canada had set up computer labs in ten rural area
schools in Punjab where 250 students and teachers were trained
using training material in Urdu language by the project team at
CRULP. Internet connectivity was also provided to the
participating schools. At the end of the training program, a
webpage development competition was conducted where participants
were encouraged to produce their own, original and locally
relevant content. Entries were invited in three categories;
namely community website (by a group of students), school
website (by a group of students) and individual website (locally
relevant website by individual students). 57 entries were
received and evaluated by a panel of judges from IT industry,
education, government and other relevant sectors who expressed
appreciation for the effort put into the development of the
websites at this platform.
The prize distribution ceremony was attended by Dr. Sarmad
Hussain-Project Director- Dareecha, Mr. Shehryar Sultan Ex-DCO
Sargodha, Dr. Khaver Zia-Dean CS Department Beaconhouse National
University and Dr. Javed Ghani-Chairman Punjab IT Board.
National ICT R&D Fund was represented by Mr. Fawad Younus,
GM-Monitoring who highly appreciated the efforts of the team at
CRULP for providing learning opportunities to the rural
population at the grass-root level. Winners were awarded cash
prizes and all participants were given certificates for their
participation in the competition.
National ICT R&D Fund strongly promotes content creation through
professional training organizations in local and national
languages thus providing opportunities to youth for developing
ICT skills and connecting to cyberspace. National ICT R&D Fund
remains committed to facilitate high-quality ICT initiatives by
providing funding opportunities.
