Interview: Epaathsala tries to make \"technology available to college faculties and students\"

Ms. Pooja Vasudev the, VP of Business Development at ed-tech platform Epaathsala answers a few questions detailing upon the company’s unique selling points, its emergence itself and the problems currently in the field that it is trying to solve.

1. How did the idea of Epaathsala come up?

Initially, when Epaathsala was started we were working with a few colleges to maintain their website among other things. One such client was gearing up for accreditation and spoke to us wondering if we could help them to understand the accreditation process better. Since most of these processes were manual it was costing them an enormous amount of time and manpower to get the data from multiple sources, compile them and create reports. No specific guidelines were telling them how the reports and supporting documents were to be created, so we hen realized that this was a perennial problem in almost all the colleges and universities and no company or software was addressing this problem. That’s when Epaathsala decided to develop software to aid institutions and enable them to go through the accreditation process seamlessly and with reduced manual intervention. This gives the institutions more time to work on improving the quality of the existing processes and set up new processes if need be.

2. What is Epaathsala?

Epaathsala is a portfolio company of Times Internet and is a platform for all colleges and universities to manage accreditation and campus automation. Thus, it aims at improving the quality of the institutional processes.

Epaathsala caters to easily creating reports and supporting documents for multiple accreditations such as NAAC, NBA, ABET, NIRF etc. It also contains multiple templates to create documentation if such documentation were not maintained previously. 

The software has an AI-based module, which is a pioneer in India for accreditation, that goes through all data and identifies the improvement areas for every process and suggests the improvements for the same to the IQAC coordinator of the institution. It also contains inbuilt ICT modules for quality improvement as per various national and international accreditation standards.

Epaathsala contains a comprehensive campus automation module with payment gateway. The AI-based engine models processes with a robust dynamic framework that can be used to model any existing business processes. Apart from the standard modules that any ERP would contain such as Admission, Academics to Alumni, it also contains dynamic rules engine and task-based workflow. Moreover, the accreditation requirements are built into the software. This user would not need to know the requirements of the accreditation and yet the accreditation requirements and the documents will be maintained.

In short, Epaathsala is a one-stop solution for all accreditation requirements and campus automation.

3. What technology advancement does epaathsala provide?

Epaathsala uses the latest Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning-based technologies to make technology accessible to the end-users, i.e., faculties and students. Traditionally, it is observed that faculties are not well aware of latest technologies and even technology companies do not consider the ed-tech sector as a potential area for investment for the latest technologies. However, Epaathsala has taken it as an opportunity and is aiming at changing this very belief by bringing cutting edge technologies to create solutions that would address the problem with maximum ease of use for the faculties, who do not need to know advanced computing skills. Epaathsala is being used by colleges in remote parts of India where the internet itself is a question mark most of the times, but the faculties are using it daily as a part of their regular college activities.

4. What are the various new initiatives epaathsala came up?

Epaathsala has launched a Total Quality Assurance Program where we support institutions, faculties and students for quality assurance as per accreditation standards. For institutions, we provide a cloud-based software for accreditation and campus management, help to set up incubation centre, assist to get MoUs with institutions of repute. For faculties, we fund for research projects, help them to set up online courses and MOOC courses. For students, we provide many value-added courses of thirty hours each, provide internship and live projects, assist them for higher education, provide personal and career counselling.