Tablet Program Wastes Billions With Less Than 11% Actual Use

Democratic Party list MP Ratchapla Intavong Suvanakiri raised concerns during parliament's scrutiny of the Education Ministry's Basic Learning Promotion Project, a five-year mega-project worth 17.3 billion baht to distribute tablets to teachers and students. The programme has already disbursed over 5.17 billion baht, but results fail to justify public spending.

Data from the 100 pilot schools with the highest usage showed only 11 percent of registered students—just 16,946 out of 150,000—actually used the system. Teacher usage was even worse at 6.9 percent, with only 542 out of 7,836 registered teachers accessing the platform. Average session duration was just 1 minute and 9 seconds before users logged off. Field interviews revealed all surveyed teachers were pleased to receive free tablets but had never used the National Digital Learning Platform system at all, rendering the project essentially a mass file-storage system with no practical benefit.

Ratchapla said the programme fails to address educational inequality, as most tablets were distributed to well-equipped schools in major cities while disadvantaged children—particularly in the three southernmost border provinces and at-risk dropouts—received nothing. These students need travel and meal subsidies to stay in school, not technology they cannot access. She proposed four remedies: redirecting the remaining 11 billion baht to genuine human capital investment such as the Educational Equity Fund supporting 4.3 million at-risk students; separating new spending from existing commitments to identify cuts; changing success metrics from tablet distribution numbers to student learning outcomes and employability; and implementing decentralised procurement oversight to prevent corruption.