 Good morning and welcome to this exciting workshop on news of Akash in education. We have with us the chief guest of this brief inaugural function, Professor Devan Khakkar, director of IIT Bombay. I would like to welcome him. Thank you very much for dressing the occasion. Let me also welcome Professor Uday Gayatonde, the main coordinator of this course. Thank you so much. As you all know, it is a very short program of two days, packed with a lot of information. So without further ado, I would very briefly tell you about the contours of this workshop. More than 17,000 teachers have registered for this workshop and I think 12,000 teachers have confirmed. I have already advised all the central coordinators if finally a student wish to attend or other teachers who have not registered wish to attend, they would be most welcome to attend as audit participants, although obviously no ISD certificates would be given to them. This is the first-ever workshop on training people on how to use Akash tablets for educational purposes. Many more will follow. We are very fortunate that IIT Bombay got this opportunity to serve the nation by spearheading the efforts to integrate tablet computers and such other technologies in the educational stream. And we are also fortunate that there are 250 colleges which have become partner institutions of IIT Bombay in order to jointly carry out project activities, development activities on Akash through their BE and ME students. With this brief, I would like to request Prasadevan Khakkar, director IIT Bombay and a great supporter of both our 10,000 teacher program as well as the Akash tablets to give his brief inaugural address. Prasadevan Khakkar. Thank you, Prof. Fattak. First of all, it is really a pleasure for me to welcome all of you virtually of course to IIT Bombay and to this workshop on Akash for education. It is really a sort of marvel of technology that 12,000 plus teachers are connected to us in more than 230 centers and what we owe this to is a major new national asset which is the national knowledge network. So I am very glad that we can connect in this way and that we can actually do useful things over the national knowledge network. Akash, the Akash tablet project is a major national project and it is a very important project for education starting of course with engineering education but for education in general. There are many obvious uses of Akash, we can see so many things like there can be material that you can read on Akash, you can view lectures on Akash, you can do programming on Akash and many of these have already been demonstrated and you will see this during the course of the workshop that there are many interesting applications that are very useful for engineering education that are already have been developed. But I think this is not enough and really the object of this workshop is to involve all of you in developing new applications for Akash in education. I think the workshop will enable you to see how this can be done and for Akash to be a success all of you need to participate. I would also like to mention, Fartak mentioned this, there is a piece of very good news. This particular workshop is really part of a major program called Teach 1000 Teachers which has morphed now into Teach 10000 Teachers. This program has been supported by the MHRD and I am very glad to announce that the next phase of this project again led by Professor Fartak and this time in partnership with IIT Kharagpur has been sanctioned and in fact you can expect many more such workshops. The project amount that has been sanctioned is 192 crores in the next 5 years and the aim is to reach at least 1.5 lakh teachers in this time period. So, this is a very ambitious project and again I am sure that many of you will be participating in this project. All of these initiatives are part of the national mission on education using ICT which you may have heard of. Again this has been a great success over the last planned period where many important projects like talk to a teacher, national program on technology enhanced learning, NPTEL which has recorded so many lectures in engineering and so forth, virtual labs project, the open source project. There have been a large number of projects which have emerged and of course IIT Bombay strongly committed to working in this arena of using ICT for education. In fact we have a new educational technology program in which we plan to do research in how technology can be used to enhance education. So, really I feel this workshop is an invitation to all of you to become part of a larger community in which we are all trying to think and see how technology can be used as part of our normal educational practices. To make a difference I think we need to collaborate this is a very nice way these workshops are very nice way for an initial introduction. Let us work together and see that we can do a lot more and make a big difference to the overall education scenario in the country. So, welcome once again and I wish you all for a very enjoyable course in the next two days. Thank you. All of you can see how excited we at IIT Bombay to partner with all of you. I would like you all to remember some key words which Prasad Khakkar mentioned. One that this workshop is only an initial introduction. Two he and all of us look forward to all you teachers and your students working closely with us over the next few years to unleash the creative talent of your students and to work with our students here and our researchers and with you to create very innovative solutions which will far outgrow the confines of educational applications alone. Of course that is our primary target. We need to develop educational applications. We need to develop educational contents not only limited to engineering education but to cover the entire gamut of education starting from primary school to high school to higher education. And please remember that we also have to contribute to content and applications in Indian languages for which I will mention some more details later. But I would like to commit to our director on behalf of all of you and all of us here. Sir will fulfill this wish and within the next you will see Akash and the Akash related projects making a significant difference first to the educational framework of the country and subsequently for contributing to solutions of many problems which faces. I would like to acknowledge the presence of amongst the many guests here two special people who have helped us with their great advice and contribution during the procurement phase of Akash project. Professor H.B. Swas there are two more names I would like to mention Professor Dinesh Sharma of electrical engineering department and Professor Jyotar Wasi who has been helping us. Of course our colleagues Professor Kannan Moudgalyan who is a co-PI on this project and Professor Sridharayya have not been able to come here. Let me just mention that a lot of people have worked for last six months to develop applications contents and to guide us through the procurement process that we see a successful beginning of this project. Thank you so much.