Not-for-profit EPIC Foundation on Tuesday launched the first designed in India, Artificial Intelligence (AI)-enabled, indigenously manufactured education tablet.

Designed by VVDN Technologies in collaboration with MediaTek India and CoRover.ai, the tablets come embedded with unique features of repairability and upgradability to address the pressing concerns of the digital divide and the accumulation of electronic refuse in India.

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“It is a matter of great pride that we are launching an India-designed, India-inspired education tablet which will be of great use to a vast majority of students. It will inspire the youth to take up the mantra of design and making things in India, for India and for the world,” said S Krishnan, Secretary, MeitY, at the launch of the tablet.

“Aligned with our overarching goal of elevating Indian electronics to real Atmanirbharta, we want to build products in such a way that the components are easily replaceable and upgradable,” added Dr. Ajai Chowdhry, Chairman EPIC Foundation.

The new product will address two critical aspects of education and social empowerment: drive demand for ‘Indian, repairable, sustainable’ electronics products and brands in high impact/high-volume categories; and remove financial and logistical obstacles that prevent schools from obtaining repairable, high impact devices and increase life of the product.

“Repair expenses surpassing the cost of purchasing a new device, the production of substandard goods and obsolescence strategies are not only pressing concerns of today but also exacerbate the escalating problem of electronic waste. Our repairable product will enable many jobs all over India for repair engineers,” Chowdhry noted.

Aimed at playing an active enabler of digital learning, the education tablet is first of its kind to come integrated with the BharatGPT virtual assistant and will highlight AI/ML based inter-lingual translation for Indian languages (Voice-2-Voice, Text-2-Text etc) to support language diversity of India and inclusion of differently abled fellow citizens.

“In the electronics sector, while we have large targets of increasing the overall exports from the country, which is undoubtedly important — when exports go up, the imports also go up simply because the value addition which happens in the country is still limited, and a significant portion is imported, assembled and then re-exported or used for domestic consumption,” Krishnan said.

He noted that “increasing value addition in the electronics sector is key and thereby the need for increasing the share of electronic component production in India.”

“These are MeitY’s next goals, riding on the success of the large-scale electronics PLI which is the most successful PLI programme that the Government of India has run in recent times” Krishnan said.