A week-long event to celebrate a ‘techade’ of the Digital India Programme was held between July 4-10, 2022 at Mahatma Nagar, Gandhinagar, Gujarat. The Hon’ble Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi inaugurated the event. The overarching theme was ‘Digital India: Catalyzing New India’s Techade’. As part of the event, a ‘Digital Mela’ was organized.

“India Talent” was one of the central themes of the Mela. Key stakeholders of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) were invited to showcase various teaching-learning technology initiatives that have a national presence. Amrita Center for Research in Analytics, Technology and Education (AmritaCREATE), a multidisciplinary research center at Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, was invited to be a part of the MeitY eLearning exhibit. Two key projects funded by MeitY, and developed in collaboration with C-DAC, Online Labs (OLabs), and Medical Simulations (MedSIM) were showcased at the event.

Dr. Prema Nedungadi, Director, AmritaCREATE, and Chair, School of Computing, Amritapuri, led the team comprising Sreekala P, Project Manager; Rathnam Chenthamarakshan, Program Lead; Ashima Vijayan, Marketing Executive, and Dhruv Nayak, Android Developer. Dr. Nedungadi commented on the increasing importance of eLearning for skill development in medical education and the untapped potential of medical simulations must be explored further citing the example of the success of the MedSIM project.

During the three-day event, the Minister of State, Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, Skill Development and Entrepreneurship, Rajeev Chandrashekaran; Shri. Alkesh Kumar Sharma, Secretary, MeitY; Shri. Jaideep Kumar Mishra, Additional Secretary, MeitY; and Shri. Jitendrabhai Savjibhai Vaghani, Minister of Education, Government of Gujarat interacted with the team, visited the exhibit, and viewed the demos. There was a steady flow of visitors keen to learn more about the projects on display and the overall response from all visitors was positive.