IIT Madras faculty platform ‘PadhAI’ to offer data science courses at just Rs 1,000

The Indian Institute of Technology-Madras (IIT-M) faculty was offering affordable courses on Data Science through their platform 'PadhAI'.

They are launching an online self-paced course on Foundations of Data Science, which covers from beginners' level, the mathematical and programming skills required for a data scientist. The five-month course was affordably priced at Rs 1,000 for students and faculty members, a release from IIT-M said today.

'PadhAI' is the online school of One-Fourth Labs, an IIT-M incubated Start-up founded by Dr Mitesh Khapra and Dr Pratyush Kumar, Assistant Professors in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering.

The release said that there is rising demand for trained data scientists across most industries such as manufacturing, financial services, healthcare, education, and IT. ''To step-up to this demand, an increasing number of professionals and students were looking for good quality data science courses," it said.

However, most courses were expensively priced ranging from tens of thousands to even lakhs of rupees, thereby putting a heavy premium on acquiring skills towards this lucrative career path.Dr Mitesh Khapra, Co-Founder, One Fourth Labs, said, "With PadhAI, for us it is Nation first. One primary goal is to ensure that every college student in our country in engineering, science, or commerce disciplines receives an accessible and foundational understanding of data science. This is an essential skill for the future."