University of Delhi Builds and Scales Samarth eGov on AWS to Transform Governance in India’s Higher Education

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). As a cloud-based service, the Samarth eGov suite offers over 40 software modules encompassing academics, administration, student services, human resources, governance, accounting, and finance to central and state universities, HEIs, and technical institutions in India. The suite includes an automation engine that allows universities and higher education institutions to transition from paper-based and traditional third-party enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems to a more secure, reliable, and scalable platform that standardizes and automates digital processes and workflows. Samarth eGov uses AWS to assist educational institutions in improving the speed and quality of education services in order to provide a more dependable experience to students, faculty, and staff. With the growing statewide acceptance of Samarth eGov, educational institutions are becoming more agile in adjusting to educational policy changes and market sector demands.

More than 200 universities and HEIs in India have already embraced Samarth eGov, including more than 40 central and state universities and more than 100 colleges. Samarth eGov 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 eGov’s adoption is expected to reach more than 500 HEIs by 2023.

Prof. Sanjeev Singh, Joint Director, University of Delhi South Campus, said, “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. The reliability, agility, scalability, and security offered by AWS enables us to build Samarth eGov to realize our vision and confidently scale it to empower higher education institutions and students nationwide.”

Rahul Sharma, Regional Head, Public Sector – AISPL, AWS India and South Asia, said, “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. AWS is pleased to enable the Samarth eGov suite with the power of the cloud, and enhance the availability, quality, speed, and experience of education services for students, educators, and administrators.”

Over the last 24 months, Samarth eGov 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 at the University of Delhi, ensuring the continuity of education and career progression for students. From January to July 2022, the institution handled over 663,000 student applications, allowing students to begin their university adventure with ease. Students could use Samarth eGov to easily access basic information about courses, selection criteria, registration, admission, and fee payments online. In addition, educational institutions can improve student results by automating operations such as managing teaching schedules and freeing up educators’ time to focus on instructional activities such as giving individualized lessons depending on students’ performance. Samarth eGov guarantees that universities and HEIs have enough faculty staff to serve student needs and provide courses by automating the faculty recruiting process and shortening the hiring period for new educators from months to a few days.

Samarth eGov is built with AWS services such as 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 computing service, enables Samarth eGov to run code for virtually any sort of application without creating or managing servers, and Amazon Relational Database Service makes it simple for Samarth eGov to set up, operate, and extend its databases in the cloud. Communication with students and educators is a critical function of Samarth eGov, and the platform generates hundreds of thousands of SMS, email, and mobile push notifications using services such as Amazon Simple Email Service, a cost-effective, flexible, and scalable email service, and Amazon Simple Notification Service.