Ratklao Critiques 17B Baht Tablet Budget, Urges Review
Ratklao criticizes the 17B baht tablet budget with under 11% actual usage, urging Parliament and Deputy PM Yoschanan to review KPIs and bidding.
Stock photo for illustration only, not from the actual event
- Ratklao critiques the 17B baht tablet budget with actual usage below 11%.
- Highlights a 588.9M baht e-Bidding contract with only a single bidder.
- Urges Parliament and Deputy PM Yoschanan to reallocate funds to the EEF.
- Proposes 4 educational reforms, moving away from hardware-focused KPIs.
Ratklao revealed findings from field surveys regarding the 17,000 million baht tablet procurement project, stating that while teachers were happy to receive free devices, interviews confirmed that none of them had ever utilized the NDLP (National Digital Learning Platform) system on the tablets. The project merely imposes a burden on teachers to upload materials without collaborative benefits, acting essentially as a large Google Drive enforced upon educators.
Stock photo for illustration only, not from the actual event
Furthermore, Ratklao analyzed the inequality issues, noting that cloud technology and platforms cannot replace teachers and fail to bridge educational gaps. Tablet allocation maps showed devices primarily sent to well-equipped urban schools, while impoverished children, particularly in the three southern border provinces or those at risk of dropping out, received no benefits when what they actually needed were travel and food subsidies to stay in school.
Regarding transparency in e-Bidding procurement, Ratklao cited the Bangkok Secondary Educational Service Area Office District 1 project worth over 588.9 million baht, where only a single bidder submitted a proposal and won by bidding just 178,600 baht below the reference price—saving the state a mere 0.03%. Such patterns carry high corruption risks since budgets distributed across nationwide education districts are exceptionally difficult to audit.
“My team and I visited teachers who received the tablets. Everyone was glad to get free items, but when asked if they ever accessed the NDLP system through the tablets, everyone uniformly answered that they had never used it.”
Ratklao
In response to these issues, Ratklao proposed four key recommendations to Parliament and committee members:
- Reallocate the remaining budget of over 11,000 million baht into investments that genuinely build human capital, such as the Equitable Education Fund (EEF) supporting 4.3 million at-risk children whose budgets were cut.
- Classify and review binding commitments, separating legacy contract burdens from new expansions to trim unnecessary spending.
- Revise Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) by halting the measurement of success through distributed tablet counts and shifting focus to student knowledge skills and employability.
- Close corruption loopholes by rapidly establishing decentralized procurement auditing systems to prevent leaks.
This scrutiny of educational budgeting highlights structural challenges in integrating technology into Thai classrooms, particularly the disconnect between public procurement and practical classroom implementation. Pumping massive budgets into hardware without assessing readiness and content ecosystems often leads to unused equipment and low teaching efficiency—serving as a vital lesson for future public digital investments.
Finally, Ratklao delivered a message through Parliament to Deputy Prime Minister Yoschanan Wongsuwan, who oversees human capital development, calling for bold thinking, an end to administrative inertia, and a stop to education reforms that merely increase devices in teachers' hands or result in inefficient budget allocations.
Source: Matichon Politics
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