School students across India match their elocution skills on a platform that integrates cutting edge technology and interactivity

The fourth edition of the National Digital Elocution Competition (NDEC) 2009 was launched in January 2009 in partnership with Microsoft. NDEC is a digital elocution competition that leverages technology to provide school-going students with a national platform to showcase their elocution talent and win exciting prizes.

The participants are categorised into groups—Junior (class V-VII) and Senior (VIII-X)—and are given topics on which they need to record and upload an elocution video. Highly interactive technology platforms such as VDO Contest and Video Conferencing are used to enable participants across India to participate in the competition sans boundaries. VDO Contest is a ready-to-use web-based application that offers participants the convenience of online registration and the facility to record and upload videos directly on the NDEC website. Video Conferencing facilitates live face-to-face interaction between participants in two or more Reliance World locations across India.

Microsoft leveraged the NDEC 2009 platform to promote Internet security amongst participants and the topics for the preliminary round of the competition were in perspective. More than 8500 participants from over 1050 schools across India registered for this year’s NDEC and 7200 plus elocution videos were recorded nationwide using the VDO Contest platform. The videos were then reviewed by the NDEC 2009 Censorship team and published on the NDEC website. Thereafter, participants were able to view and promote their elocution videos to gather online votes.

There was a special prize for the most voted video and therefore, not surprisingly, the response to Online Voting was overwhelming. Participants vied with one another to gather the most number of votes and several videos received more than 50,000 online votes and were viewed more than 3 lac times. By the end of the Online Voting period, the total number of video views and online votes had crossed 21 and 8 lacs respectively.

The national semi-finals were held on 18th February, 2009. 26 participants—13 from each group—were invited to a Reliance World in their city and were given new topics to present their elocution. The participants were connected in a multi-point Video Conference that enabled them to see each other as they presented their elocution and were judged live by a jury panel based in Mumbai. It was a stiff competition between the participants of the senior group with 6 participants (instead of 5) eventually qualifying for the finals.

The finals of NDEC 2009 were held on 21st February, 2009 using Video Conferencing. The finalists were given new topics for their elocution and were judged live by a panel of judges based in Mumbai. Below are the names of the winners.

Reliance World thanks all the participants, their parents and school authorities.