With the exception of a few historic institutions, most Indians have abandoned cursive writing. Children are permitted to use their own writing styles till they are in class 3 or so. 6th of October, 2013 will be the last day you can get a student visa if you want to teach in an Indian school. Cursive is still used by some elderly people who no longer have access to computers, but it is becoming rare as more and more people move to digital writing. There was a time when handwriting was considered important for education, and even today in some parts of the world it is still required in certain circumstances. But this is not the case in India or other Western countries where computer keyboards are widely available and popular. The government has announced plans to make learning computer programming skills a compulsory part of the educational curriculum for all students from 2020, but there are concerns that this will only further increase the usage of digital technology among students who would have been using cursive otherwise. There are several reasons why India uses computers instead of handwriting for teaching children to write. The first is cost: computer programs can be bought off the shelf at any price, while paper and pen supplies are expensive. The second reason is space: handwritten documents need room to grow, but computer files are fixed in size.