Widening children's horizons with 'internet grannies' in New Delhi

"How did the universe begin?" I asked the small group of pupils at the Government Girls School in Kalkaji, New Delhi, thinking I'd be able to wow the group with some cosmology. "Well," said 13-year-old Deepa Kumari, without a moment's hesitation, "according to the Big Bang theory."

Deepa is one of more than 2,000 pupils at the Kalkaji school, which sits in a small plot of land in the thickly-populated south of Delhi. When I went to visit for On Assignment, I saw dilapidated buildings that had holes in the walls and roofs in desperate need of repair. The long, dark classrooms were filled with tightly-packed rows of wooden desks. In each class, there were 50 or so pupils per teacher, a few textbooks, an old blackboard and, seemingly, not much more.

This a typical government-funded school, of the kind that will educate the majority of the city's children. Any child whose parents cannot afford the fees for one of the much swankier, well-resourced private schools in the city, will likely spend time in a school like this one.

Perhaps surprisingly for a country so internationally famous for its IT prowess, Kalkaji school only got its first computers two years ago. There are only a four of them sitting in a small room off the main playground and they aren't used for any part of the formal curriculum here.

Instead, pupils can come into the computer lab only when they don't have classes elsewhere. There are no lessons in here and pupils are left free to do whatever they want - they can play games on the computers or just surf the internet.

Once in a while, a volunteer "granny" beams in over Skype from somewhere else the world to have a chat - they're called grannies because these volunteers spend time encouraging the girls, congratulating them when they do something well, rather then teaching them anything specific.

If that all sounds unfocused and random, then the results of this "School in the Cloud" experiment might surprise you. The girls at the Kalkaji school had never seen a computer two years ago, never mind the internet. Left alone with the computers and with no external direction from teachers, the girls not only figured out how to operate the computers, they worked out the best way to look for information on the web and many even taught themselves English in the process.

Over time, their confidence has grown and so have their aspirations. A new world of opportunity has opened up for them via the screen - many of the girls told me they want to grow up to be teachers, inventors and scientists, among other things. Ideas and targets they might otherwise never have known.

Deepa and her friends told me they spent several hours a week in the computer lab. They use Google and other search engines to type out questions - either things they are curious about themselves or which they have been asked to find by the volunteer "grannies".

I tried testing them on some science questions (How fast does the Earth move? What is gravity?) but the girls batted them away with few problems. If they didn't know immediately, they worked together to find the answer on the web within minutes and then spent a while each time trying to understand what the answers they had found actually meant.

They were a thoughtful group, with big ideas for their future. Deepa told me about her fascination with black holes and took me through the basic physics of these celestial objects before announcing that she had plans to build a spaceship one day that would be able to withstand the enormous gravity so that she could take a look inside one. Alongside all that, at some point, she'd also like to design a robot that can teach schoolchildren, an electric scooter and she would like to usher in a safer, more environmentally-conscious India.

Despite the Kalkaji school's relative lack of resources and opportunities, it's not hard to find intelligence, creativity and energy in the children I met there. It's hard to think that the children would have shown their potential range from the normal school lessons alone, since that sort of thinking and creativity certainly wasn't encouraged by the teachers, I was told. The extracurricular computers have widened many of these children's horizons and oriented their dreams in directions they might otherwise never have considered.

How many of them actually get to realise those dreams will, of course, depend on the opportunities they subsequently get to continue their education to a higher level. But the experiment of simply putting an internet-connected computer into a school has already shown that it doesn't take much to start children down that promising, shining path, to value learning and at least have the idea that they can do something interesting and different with their lives.

And if there's anyone who will get around to building that physics-defying, black-hole-proof spaceship one day, my money's on someone like Deepa.

Watch Alok Jha's full report tonight on ITV's On Assignment at 10.40pm.