The Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT Madras) faculty are offering affordable courses on data science through their platform 'PadhAI', it said on Tuesday.

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.

This five-month course is affordably priced at Rs 1,000 for students and faculty members, the Institute said in a statement.

"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," said Mitesh Khapra, Co-Founder, One Fourth Labs - an IIT Madras incubated Start-up.

"Often data science is taught in an isolation, and separated from the advanced and more popular topics of machine learning and deep learning. We are working towards bridging this gap with a unified series of courses across these topics," Khapra added.

According to the Institute, 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 are looking for good quality data science courses.

However, most courses are 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.

The courses in PadhAI are designed towards providing foundational insight. The PadhAI course on data science begins on 1st February 2020 and is accepting enrolments at padhai.onefourthlabs.in. 

The professors are expecting to follow-up this course on data science with subsequent affordably priced courses on Machine Learning and Deep Learning.