Ten government schools in Samba district now have working smart classrooms — not because of a state education budget line, but because a private company's corporate social responsibility grant paid for it. District Development Commissioner (DDC) Samba, Ayushi Sudan, virtually inaugurated the newly built classrooms on September 7 from the conference hall of the DC office, formally handing them over for use.
Who actually paid for this
The project was funded by NTT Data, the Japan-headquartered IT services company, under its Corporate Social Responsibility programme, and executed on the ground by ELFA International, a not-for-profit that works on education and livelihood projects in Jammu and Kashmir. Neither the funding amount nor the specific list of the 10 participating schools has been made public yet — a gap worth flagging plainly rather than papering over, since it's the detail most useful to a student or parent trying to find out if their own school is one of the ten.
The ceremony drew a heavier turnout of officials than is typical for a school-infrastructure handover: Additional District Development Commissioner Champa Devi Thakur, Assistant Commissioner Development Rafiq Ahmad Jaral, Chief Planning Officer Kasturi Lal, CEO Yashpal Sharma, and ELFA International's CEO and president, Nawab Mehran Khan, along with the organisation's senior vice president, Iftikhar Ahmad Mir, and members of its project team.
In her remarks, Sudan said access to digital tools "can significantly improve attendance, enhance student motivation and strengthen foundational competencies," particularly in what she called hard-to-reach and underserved parts of the district, and asked ELFA International to continue similar projects in Samba going forward. NTT Data's vice-president for Global CSR and India Marketing, Ankur Dasgupta, framed the grant as part of a wider access argument: "access to quality education, enabled by technology, should be within reach of every child regardless of geography or circumstance."
What a "smart classroom" upgrade usually means
Neither NTT Data nor ELFA International has published a technical spec sheet for what exactly went into these 10 Samba classrooms — no confirmed brand, screen size, or device count for this specific rollout. What's known from similar CSR- and government-funded smart classroom projects elsewhere in Jammu and Kashmir is the general shape of the upgrade: an interactive flat panel or smart TV paired with a projector or built-in display, replacing the chalkboard as the default teaching surface, run off pre-loaded digital content and lesson software rather than a live internet connection in most rural deployments. If Samba's rollout follows that pattern, teachers get a way to show diagrams, videos and simulations — a periodic table that can be zoomed into, a solar system that can be rotated — instead of relying only on a textbook and a blackboard.
Not the state's only push — a different one
This is the second CSR-funded rollout from the same NTT Data–ELFA International partnership in J&K in as many months: in August, the pair inaugurated five ICT labs in Government schools across Srinagar district. It's also running in parallel with a much larger, separately funded push — a Parliament reply this August confirmed 530 schools across the Jammu Lok Sabha constituency, including in Samba tehsil, approved for government-funded smart classrooms under the Centre's Samagra Shiksha scheme (JammuBeat's earlier coverage has the full breakdown by assembly segment). The two efforts are unrelated in funding and in who runs them, but they point the same direction: Samba's government-school classrooms are, this year, being upgraded from more than one source at once.
Why it matters if you're in a Samba school right now
For students at whichever 10 schools were picked, the practical change is a working digital display in at least one classroom from this week onward — genuinely useful for board-exam-relevant diagrams and processes that are hard to teach off a blackboard, in subjects like science and geography. For everyone else in the district, the honest read is that this is one CSR grant covering ten schools, not a district-wide rollout; the bigger number to watch is the 530-school Samagra Shiksha count already moving through Jammu, Samba and Reasi. If your school isn't one of the ten named here, it may still be on that separate list once schools are named — worth asking your headteacher directly, since neither list has been made public block-by-block yet.
Sources: Daily Excelsior.
