Salem Goverment Engineering College to roll out mobiles

In a first-of-its-kind initiative in Tamil Nadu, Salem’s Government College of Technology will soon be able to roll out cell phones and OTT (similar to set-top boxes for TVs) boxes manufactured through its technology incubator STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Medicine) programme, according to the college’s research advisor Dr. T. Jeyaprabhu.

Set up at a cost of Rs. 3 crore, the incubator has been readied to manufacture between 600 to 800 cell phones a month. This follows Dr. Jeyaprabhu’s signing agreements with Vietnam’s VNPT (similar to BSNL in India), China’s Dr. Peng’s Lab and Hong Kong’s MU.

While VNPT would manufacture smartphones costing roughly Rs.3000, MU aims to produce costlier, high-end mobile phones while Dr. Peng’s labs have agreed to help produce OTT (over the top) content boxes for both video and audio data. 

“This programme will help students gain first-hand, hands-on knowledge, so that they are employable when they leave the campus,” Dr. Jeyaprabhu said. A scientist, largely credited with locating the Dornier aircraft which went missing recently and the Malaysian airlines aircraft which crashed into the sea, his forays into Einstein’s theory of relativity enabled him to hone his skills in “total technology”.

The college is now awaiting the State government’s nod to start production. 

College principal Dr. Waheeda Banu told this newspaper, “The venture was started with a view to make students industry-ready. With the expectation of industry and academia not being on the same wavelength due to differing expectations, this venture was expected to bridge the gap, ” she said.

Disclosing that officials have planned to visit the college soon, the principal said the entire venture would be manned by students. This was also the only engineering college in the country to have its own 150-seater planetarium, she disclosed.