EDUSAT, India's education satellite

After we get married in early 2013, my fiance Hanna and I are planning a year-long round the world trip, starting in India. Throughout the trip, I hope we'll be able to check out some English classrooms and perhaps teach a few lessons. Hanna has a friend that works with a school near Calcutta, and we're currently planning to volunteer there for 2 months and do some teaching. I've never taught in a developing country before, so I started poking around the internet looking for information about teaching ESL in developing countries and Indian education. Pretty quickly I stumbled upon this:

http://indiacurrentaffairs.org/edusat-teacher-student-connectivity/

Apparently a few years ago India launched an "education satellite", in order to direct education to students in rural areas. Teachers are filmed and then broadcast and shown in these rural classrooms, and the students follow along on their own.

First of all I think it's important to say that any country willing to spend the money to launch a satellite devoted to education at least has its heart in the right place. But in looking at standards developed by the UNESCO International Institute for Educational Planning:

- national leadership and ownership should be the touchstone of any intervention;
- strategies must be context relevant and context specific;
- they should embrace an integrated set of complementary interventions, though implementation may need to proceed in steps;
- partners should commit to a long-term investment in capacity development, while working towards some short-term achievements;
- outside intervention should be conditional on an impact assessment of national capacities at various levels.

it seems that India's investment in this educational satellite is the opposite of "context relevant and context specific". Instead of "embracing an integrated set of complementary interventions", the satellite seems like a one-size-fits-all situation in which students listen (but can't interact) with a teacher hundreds of miles away, whose lesson probably has no relationship to the specific realities they face in their village and region. Might the money spent on this satellite have been better spent on empowering local teachers in each community?

All this said, I admit I have no understanding of the Indian educational system, and perhaps the satellite's broadcasts are more closely connected to the curriculums of the local teachers. However, most of the internet searches I made on the satellite only came up with technical specs of the satellite itself. It seems education is easily eclipsed by technology!

A jumping off point for further info (and my inspiration for this post):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education#Education_in_the_Developing_World