 I would now like to briefly introduce Professor Kannan Maudgalyan who is going to speak to you on the general projects under the national mission on education through information and communication technologies. As you are aware, T-10KT is part of the national mission project but there are several large projects going on across the country and IIT Bombay itself is conducting many of these large scale projects which have a great impact at the national level. So while I handle two of the projects, there are other colleagues who handle individual projects, Professor Kannan actually coordinates all the projects on behalf of IIT Bombay and also coordinates with the ministry on all activities. More specifically, he has pioneered a method called spoken tutorials which is turning out to be extremely useful low cost self-learning model already used by lakhs of students. He has also pioneered, he worked with me on the Akash project shoulder to shoulder and he has taken it forward to create an affordable network kind of system which is very low cost and runs Linux. I would not like to steal thunder from his talk so I would like to request Professor Kannan to share his thoughts with you. Thank you. Good morning all the participants in all the remote centers. Welcome to this STTP course on environmental studies. I would like to give a brief overview of the NME ICT projects at IIT Bombay. What is NME ICT? It stands for National Mission on Education through ICT and I forgot to point out this is launched by M.H.R.D. in the year 2009. It stands for train 10,000 teachers under which ages this workshop is being run is funded by NME ICT. So that is a connection between NME ICT and the course you have joined for. So NME ICT is a 4600 crore, it was a 1 billion dollar project in 2009. It has 3 components, first one is to give 1 GBP as bandwidth, there were only 400 universities in 2009, I think now there are more than 600 and to connect 20,000 colleges out of this bandwidth feed to colleges as well. The second major component is the content generation. This T10KT also is funded by funded under this head. The third one is low cost access stroke computing device. If you have only bandwidth and content that is not good enough unless our children are empowered with an access device, that is why this project is important. As Professor Phatek said, Akash project was covered under this. Now we are doing a low cost laptop project about which I will come to shortly. Now I am going to spend the remaining rest of this mostly on content generation and this low cost device. Under content generation projects, the first one is T10KT as I mentioned earlier, it is an acronym stands for train 10,000 teachers. The second one is Eantra, my colleague Professor Kavya Ria is coordinating this project. This is to teach embedded systems and also innovation, creativity, etc. through robotics project, hands on project. The third one is E-Kalpa projects being coordinated by my colleague Professor Ravi Puvya of IDC and in this project, they create a large number of instructional material suitable for people who are interested in design. Professor Ravi Puvya is a professor in industrial design center at IIT Bombay. Professor Kavya Ria who handles E-Antra project is a professor in computer science and engineering department. Virtual labs is part of a national project. At the national level it is coordinated by Professor Ranjan Bose of IIT Delhi. At IIT Bombay it is coordinated by Professor Santosh Naronna of chemical engineering. We have a pedagogy project, it is an amazing project, it is led by IIT Kharagpur and Professor Sahana Murthy at IIT Bombay is coordinating this project. Now I will talk about the spoken tutorial project. This is something that Professor Fatak mentioned a while ago. I have been leading this project. I will just spend a few minutes on the spoken tutorial project and also on the low cost laptop project. So let me go to spoken tutorial website. So our project is spoken tutorial. If you just do a Google search on spoken tutorial, the first it will be ours and then we train children on ICT topics using open source software. Although it is called spoken tutorial it has a video component also, although the speakers video is not seen. Now if you see here a large number of videos are available about 30 different topics and these are dubbed into all 22 languages of the schedule 8 of our constitution. It has information on how to do training, software training, how to become a part of this. You do not have to read this, I just wanted to give a flavor of it and at the bottom of this we have names of my staff members who take care of different states, their email address and their phone number. They will be glad to organize these workshops for you, all the details of this workshop are here. We train a large number of people through this workshop. If you see here training, we have a list of colleges in which the workshops are taking place. So for example, yesterday was, it is a holiday time, not many workshops are happening but you can see in Uttarakhand, Assam, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Rajasthan, in fact this workshop is happening in all over the country and here is the statistics, you can actually go through this. When you have time I suggest that you go through this and see the details of what is happening. One of the amazing things of this project is that we have created an offline component and I would like you to explore using this, you can create your own CD. So that in a nutshell is about the Spokane tutorial project. So the last project in this, it is a FOSTI project, it is a free and open source software for education. This is the other project that I am involved with, it is called FOSTI.in. I suggest that you go through this page, there are a lot of activities that happen. A couple of activities of this I would like to point out. One is what is called a textbook companion in which students from around the country have been creating code for solved examples of various textbooks. We have about 500 Sylab textbook companions, we have about 100 Python textbook companions. These textbook companions are created in every topic and then lab migration, we help colleges migrate their labs, commercial labs into open source based labs. For example, if you have MATLAB based labs, we will be glad to migrate them to Sylab. Similarly, if you have ORCAD based labs, we will be glad to migrate them to eSim and so on. Finally about the low cost access device, you all know about Aakash project. So you might have seen the Aakash device. So this is Aakash. Now we have come up with a low cost laptop. So you can see that laptop is lot bigger. In fact, this is only a small size. I show this because when I show this laptop because of its lightweight, people think that this is Aakash. This is not Aakash. What I showed you was Aakash, it has a complete keyboard. There are three distinguishing features of this laptop. The first thing is it has an excellent build at a low cost. We bought 1000 of these to do a pilot study at a cost of rupees 4,990. You can say roughly 5000 plus customs and tax. Now so it is low cost but it has excellent build. It has only 800 grams weight. So I can easily lift it with a hand and it has a good battery time 4 to 8 hours. As a matter of fact, we identified some of the shortcomings of the Aakash tablet and corrected all of them. That's point number one, great build at a low cost. Point number one is that it has excellent content and software. For example, I don't know whether you can see it, I will ask our cameraman to zoom it. Here is the offline version of Wikipedia running on this. We have downloaded, we have made available Wikipedia in all languages, all Indian languages in the offline mode. And similarly, we have spoken tutorials available here. Once again in the offline mode, I will ask our people to zoom again. So here is spoken tutorials side by side to learn spoken tutorials. On top of it, you will see the two tabs. So the second thing is it has great software and content and finally it has a training component through spoken tutorials. And let me just point out a place where you get more information and where you can apply for this laptop. On a selective basis, unlike the Aakash project, Aakash project had an outlay of 1 lakh tablets. So Professor Phottak was magnanimous in giving a large number of these devices to every one of the remote centers. Unfortunately, we cannot do that in this laptop, we got only 1,000 of them to do a pilot. But for interested people and people who have done some work on Aakash and other open source topics, we will be glad to distribute some of these. Let me show the link to that. Laptop.fosy.in, so don't worry about this thing not playing. And here you see that tab called Apply for Fosy Laptop and you can scroll over this. This is available, we will give preference to our existing remote centers provided they have done good work in the Aakash project or in any other open source project. I did send mail in this regard earlier, unfortunately it seems to have not reached the people who participated in our Aakash workshop. So what we will do is we will send a mail again, but I am taking this opportunity to show this link to you. Please encourage all your faculty and students to apply through this link. So with that I would like to conclude this talk, I think I exceeded by about 5 minutes. I want to thank Professor Fatak for giving me this opportunity and I wish the faculty members and the participants a big success. Thank you Professor Kanan for sharing these exciting activities that are happening here.