By Chan Quan Min
The contractor for the ambitious project to put an Internet-ready device in the hands of five million Malaysian students isn’t a charity. Is 1Bestari simply an excuse for YTL to expand 4G coverage while getting the government to foot the bill? Does that explain why there is no incentive to make sure it works right?
It is a huge contract: RM4 billion over 15 years to equip the nation’s schools with high-speed Internet access and cloud-based computing systems.
Some 10,000 schools will be fitted out with the latest 4G mobile communications technology. Five million students will get Google Chromebooks, which are laptop computers without an operating system in the conventional sense. Instead, they connect directly to the Internet through a browser the moment they are turned on.
Linking up all those Chromebooks is the Frog network, a virtual learning environment where those five million students interact with their teachers and parents. Word games, textbooks, and report cards – those are the kinds of things that you will expect to find on Frog.
It’s an ambitious plan to launch rural Malaysia into the information age. For schools in the East Malaysian interior, some of which are still without water or electricity, the arrival of 1Bestari is nothing short of momentous.
Almost a billion ringgit has been spent so far, with the vast majority of schools now fitted out with telecommunications towers to beam 4G signals.
But how many of those students and teachers are using their Chromebooks and the Frog virtual learning network? Not more than 5% of all teachers and 1% of students use the system on a daily basis, according to the latest Auditor-General report out this week.
The same report found that the Internet connection from those spanking new telecommunications towers on school grounds to be less than satisfactory in more than 80% of the locations where they are installed.
Why the low adoption rates? So many things could have gone wrong here from issues with integrating the use of the Chromebooks in classrooms to network inadequacies to quite possibly a dearth of learning software on the Frog virtual learning network.
It is common for such wide-scale cloud-based systems like 1Bestari to have teething problems in the implementation phase. But to have practically no one booting up their computers, not even out of curiosity, is a sure sign that 1Bestari is broken.
Still, it’s not a complete flop yet. Most of the infrastructure is in place. All that is needed now is the initiative to follow through with the plans and fix whatever is broken.
But that’s exactly what is lacking. There is just no motivation at all to see through with the project. Why do I say this?
YTL, the contractor for 1Bestari, has little interest in bettering the education system or to spend the time to teach students and teachers how to use their Chromebooks and the Frog network.
YTL is no charity. Over the years this one company has been the beneficiary of some of the choicest (read: lopsided) contracts ever awarded by government. It is a for-profit corporation whose sole focus is the bottomline.
YTL was one of the few crony companies to get their hands on the first independent power producer (IPP) contract that virtually guaranteed it an annual rate of return on its investment in the double digits – the often quoted figure here is in the region of 17% – over the life of the project.
YTL sees 1Bestari as a not-to-be-passed-up opportunity to expand its 4G coverage nationwide while getting the government to pay for the thousands of telecommunications towers needed for the job.
Those same towers are built on school grounds – government-owned land. They’re not just for students but paying customers of Yes, the YTL telco brand that isn’t even more than four years old.
How did an upstart telco like Yes build “the largest and widest 4G network in Malaysia” in just a few short years? Simple. By ‘leveraging’ on the 1Bestari network of telecommunications towers of course.
Think about it for a moment. If you have towers in every school in the country you more or less cover most of the population centres. Just like that you get instant nationwide 4G coverage.
It’s no secret that the 1Bestari towers serve paying customers. YTL has admitted to this. It’s also no secret that those towers fell onto its lap practically for free. YTL pays a pittance in rent, if not at all, for the towers it has built on school grounds.
What we have here is a classic example of the ‘principal-agent problem.’ Ministry of Education contracts YTL to get something done supposedly in the best interest of students and teachers. Instead, YTL goes with what is in its best interest.
On the bright side, we are already on the first few steps in fixing the problem. Thanks to a third party that is the Auditor-General, the problem has now been identified. The guilty party, YTL, has been fined RM2.4 million for not delivering the goods.
All that remains is for government agencies, in particular the Ministry of Education, to keep up surveillance and to ensure future contracts are as transparent as possible and designed so as to align interests and prevent excessive profiteering by private companies.
GRRRRR!!!
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