University of Delhi Builds and Scales Samarth eGov on AWS

Amazon Web Services has announced that the University of Delhi is using AWS to enable the adoption of Samarth eGov - the open source, secure, scalable and robust process automation E-governance platform- across India’s universities and higher education institutions (HEIs). The Samarth suite provides more than 40 software modules covering academics, administration, student services, human resources, governance, accounting, and finance as a cloud-based service to central and state universities, HEIs, and technical institutions in India. The suite provides universities and HEIs with an automation engine to migrate from paper-based and traditional third-party enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems to a more secure, reliable and scalable platform that standardises and automates digital processes and workflows. Using AWS, Samarth eGov helps education institutions enhance the speed and quality of education services to offer a more reliable experience to students, faculty, and staff. With Samarth's increasing nationwide adoption, education institutions are now more agile in adapting to education policy changes and market segment demands.

Samarth eGov has already been adopted by more than 200 universities and HEIs in India, including more than 40 central and state universities, and more than 100 colleges. Samarth leverages AWS’s robust availability, scalability, speed, agility, security, and flexibility to process more than 7.6 million student admission applications, handle more than 600,000 faculty and staff recruitment applications, and manage more than 7.5 million student records nationwide. The next phase of Samarth's adoption is expected to reach more than 500 HEIs by 2023.

“The education sector is undergoing a major transformation, and it became clear that we needed a purpose-built, policy-driven and adaptable platform to support the future needs of education institutions. Samarth eGov is developed as an open-source, highly flexible, interconnected, secure and scalable platform, delivered on a software-as-a-service model with a cloud-first approach on AWS. It can address the diverse and evolving demands of universities and higher education institutions across India, irrespective of the state they belong to or the language they choose to interface with,” said Prof. Sanjeev Singh, Joint Director, University of Delhi South Campus. “The reliability, agility, scalability and security offered by AWS enables us to build Samarth eGov to realise our vision and confidently scale it to empower higher education institutions and students nationwide.”

“The education sector in India is adapting to the post-pandemic era where student expectations are rising and changing, and the engagement between students, administration and faculty are increasingly expected to be digitally driven. We congratulate the University of Delhi for embarking on and implementing Samarth eGov, a pioneering initiative in India’s higher education sector, and addressing common challenges faced by education institutions,” said Rahul Sharma, Regional Head, Public Sector – AISPL, AWS India and South Asia. “AWS is pleased to enable the Samarth suite with the power of the cloud, and enhance the availability, quality, speed, and experience of education services for students, educators, and administrators.”

In the University of Delhi, Samarth has enabled more than 1 million regular and distance learning students to participate in online examinations, supported faculty with online evaluations and grading, and awarded digitally signed blockchain-based degree certificates to more than 360,000 students over the last 24 months during the pandemic, ensuring the continuity of education and career progression for students. From January through July 2022, the university processed more than 663,000 student applications, helping students begin their university journey seamlessly. With Samarth, students could easily access basic information on courses, selection criteria, registration, admission, and fee payments online. Education institutions can also enhance student outcomes by automating processes like managing teaching schedules and freeing up educators’ time to focus on teaching activities, such as providing personalized lessons based on students’ performance. By automating the faculty hiring process and reducing the hiring period of new educators from months to a few days, Samarth ensures that universities and HEIs have enough faculty staff to support student needs and deliver lessons. Samarth is built using multiple services from AWS, including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, which is designed to provide scalable compute capacity and enables the platform to meet peak workloads such as concurrent online examinations, and Elastic Load Balancing, which is designed to distribute network traffic to improve application scalability, and is critical for managing high workloads during events such as admissions and examinations. AWS Lambda, a serverless, event-driven compute service, allows Samarth to run code for virtually any type of application without provisioning or managing servers, and Amazon Relational Database Service, makes it simple for Samarth to set up, operate, and scale its databases in the cloud. Communication with students and educators is a critical function of Samarth eGov, and the platform uses services such as Amazon Simple Email Service, a cost-effective, flexible and scalable email service, and Amazon Simple Notification Service, to generate hundreds of thousands of SMS, email, and mobile push notifications.

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