This discussion is centered on the trends, challenges and opportunities in fast expanding AV and digital education industry. Though in India a lot space has to be covered in terms of digitizing education, it is picking up fast. Most important is localizing the content and software to suit the Indian way of teaching and the overall teacher-student-course ecosystem. Another issue is, currently most digitization hardware is imported and the high import duties and GST are acting as speed-breakers on the digitization of education. For the digitization to be gain necessary momentum, all the entities – the government, the hardware provides, software provides and customers should work together to make it successful.
Moderator: Mr. Sukanta Dey, MBA from IIM-Kolkata and B.Tech from IIT-Kharagpur, an ICT Industry Veteran and expert who worked in senior positions with several leading companies in the past.
PANELISTS: Mr. Virender Singh, Chief Executive Officer, Digital Live Services; Dr. Ramya Chatterjee, Chief of Solitaire Brand Business, Director & CEO, Prointek Global Innovations; Mr. Koreth Mathew, Director, A&T Video Networks; Mr. Avinash Johri, Vice President, SKYWORTH; Ms. Vani Rana, Product Manager – SaaS Growth, ViewSonic India; Mr. Kartik Deka, National Sales Manager – Displays & Pro AV, Optoma India; Mr. Deepanshu Chauhan, Founder & CEO, DeltaView Technologies Pvt Ltd.
Moderator : Mr. Sukanta Dey, MBA from IIM-Kolkata and B.Tech from IIT-Kharagpur, an ICT Industry Veteran
“We may compromise on the quality of commercial or consumer products and services to an extent but the quality of education is something which we cannot afford to compromise because it is the thing that takes the students forward during whole life. Digital education is big leap when it comes aiding the students learn. This discussion will cast light on how India is progressing when it comes to providing digital education, hybrid (physical and virtual) infrastructure, improved interactive features, software, etc. The role of AI in the interactive solutions, deployment of scalable and sustainable smart solutions, and empowerment of teachers and students are the other points of discussion.”
Mr. Virender Singh, Chief Executive Officer, Digital Live Services
“Escalation in the cost of imported digital hardware which is not manufactured in India is a challenge at present. Government has imposed 22% import duty and 28% GST on the imported Interactive Flat Panels (IFPs). That means nearly 50% of the price we have to pay to the government in the form duty and tax. Surely, this is done with the intention to promote Make in India so that more companies will start manufacturing in India. The domestic manufacturing system is still not up to the requirements. This has put a lot of financial burden on the schools particularly in the T2 and T3 cities. Right now the penetration of digital education is only 7% whereas it is nearly 99% in the developed countries. Under the circumstances, the government should scale down the import duty and taxation for some years to come to aid digitization of education.”
Dr. Ramya Chatterjee, Chief of Solitaire Brand Business, Director & CEO, Prointek Global Innovations
“We are one of the leading providers of interactive digital educations solutions in India. While providing solutions we focus on two aspects: firstly, we aim to make the work easy and effective for the teachers, and enable the students will have better learning outcomes; and secondly, we provide effective unified communications systems which will make remote learning for the students. Here, I do agree that heavy tax burden is impeding the expansion of digital education at present. We have 1.4 million schools in India. Only a fraction of this number is digitized. AI helps the teachers to develop their own content and access other content more efficiently. We are providing fully Generative AI-powered software platform that makes the work of teachers easy, efficient and effective; and the learning process of the students smooth.”
Mr. Koreth Mathew, Director, A&T Video Networks
“Earlier, we completed a project in Gujarat where 150,000 schools spread across rural areas have to be digitized. What we did there was we introduced hybrid models through which students can see lessons being taugt at different locations. Another subtle issue we focused is on the fact that different students learn differently — some learn thru videos, some thru audio, some thru still visuals, and some thru analytical methods. Today, we have multi-media systems which can help the students learn thru AI software which helps students to access the material according to their choice. A&T has its own manufacturing plant in South India, where we manufacture some of the solutions and trying to make more in future. While manufacturing domestically has some challenges like non-availability of components in India, we hope matters will improve in the coming times.”
Mr. Avinash Johri, Vice President, SKYWORTH
“SKYWORTH is in the first year of its journey. We already have a 20% share in the IFP market in India through our OEM partners; and we want to scale up this share to 30% before the end of 2026. Our products are designed to promote interactive and inclusive learning with India-specific AI solutions supporting local languages and content needs. We try to provide localized solutions which are at the same time of global standards. We also strive to provide cost-effective and easily scalable solutions. We are actively collaborating with local partners in a way that we can grow together. We are also trying our best to indigenize our solutions so that they will deliver the best learning outcomes. For the digitization to yield the best results, it needs harmonious cooperation and collaboration between the policy makers, hardware providers, software providers, partners and other associates. We take regular feedback from the users and partners and then we update the existing solutions and develop new ones so that they are more interactive in terms of picture color and contrast and zone-wise controllable brightness. In the next 2 years, we want to digitize ore 120,000 schools.”
Ms. Vani Rana, Product Manager – SaaS Growth, ViewSonic India
“I myself was a teacher earlier in my career so I had quite a bit of firsthand experience of how the digital education systems work. Despite several strides in education, technology adaptation is still lagging in our country. Today, VIewSonic takes pride in the fact that just starting as simple AV solution provider, today is providing complete digital education ecosystems to the institutes. Though the hardware has its own importance, software play crucial role as it is the platform on which teachers and students finally play their part. ViewSonic is working on applications to specially to each entity in the ecosystem in a way the apps take care of all different aspects such as audio, visual and video aspects. When we create solutions, we take into account all the participants – the school management, students, teachers and the technical staff of the institutions – to provide the right solutions. We also include motivating factors such as gamification, rewards, etc to make the whole process interesting, engaging, flexible and future-oriented. Our content solutions are also editable so that teachers can prepare and deliver them according to the level and standard of their students.”
Mr. Kartik Deka, National Sales Manager – Displays & Pro AV, Optoma India
“In India, digital education is still in the upcoming stages where both the teachers and the students need to adapt to the new way of teaching and learning. Also digitization should not become an obsession. We need to understand to what extent the tech should replace the traditional ways. Providing the hardware is not such a complex thing, but providing the right software and matching it with the hardware according to the needs of the specific customers is the crucial thing. At Optoma, we have a well-organized mature customer counseling and service support system – we train our channel partners on how to judge and provide the only the right and the necessary solutions to the customers than delivering the generalized packages. Optoma has a wide range of educations solutions, and we are very serious about playing a leading role in the Indian market.”
Mr. Deepanshu Chauhan, Founder & CEO, DeltaView Technologies Pvt Ltd
“DeltaView, a 100% Indian company, offers advanced interactive flat panels for classrooms and offices with 4K display, Android OS, screen sharing, and powerful collaboration tools. Our main focus is on providing excellent service support for several years. We are using only India-made software in our solutions. We already have some of the big companies like Pepsi and Coca-Cola among others as our clients. On the education front also we have some big universities as our customers. We install HPC (High Performance Computing) and HCI (Human Computer Interaction) servers to assist AI solutions in the classrooms. We provide all the necessary info and training to the teachers because most of them do not know what AI could do for them as they belong to the earlier generation.”
In a nutshell
Though only 7% of the schools and institutes are digitized in India, the pace of digitization is picking up. In the coming 5 years over 15% of the education space is expected to get digitized. AV solutions are closely associated with digital education. AI is accelerating and optimizing the content access and learning processes. On the flip side, all the hardware could not be manufactured in India and the devices and components that need to be imported face heavy taxes putting a lot of burden on the customers slowing down the digitization. In any case, digitization of education has a very bright future in India.
Covered By: NCN MAGAZINE / AV Solutions
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