By TIOL News Service

NEW DELHI, AUG 21, 2020: Mr Ravi Shankar Prasad, Union Minister for Electronics & IT, Communications and Law & Justice, announced today the results of Grand Challenge for Developing Video Conference Solution. Announcing the winners of the Grand Challenge, he said, “I am delighted that Indian entrepreneurs and innovators have responded to the clarion call for AatmaNirbhar Bharat given by Hon'ble Prime Minister of India and have come up with some world class video conferencing solutions in a short span of four months. We are committed to develop India's software product and mobile app economy in a big way and efforts like this will go a long way in that direction.”

The Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology had announced an Innovation Challenge for Development of a Video Conferencing Solution under the Digital India Initiative on 12th April 2020. The Innovation Challenge was open for participation from Industry, start-ups and individual experts. Overwhelming response was received across the country, with a total of 1983 applications being received, which were evaluated and subsequently supported through a three stage process (Ideation, Prototype and Product Stage).

Out of these, 12 applicants with innovative VC solutions were shortlisted to develop/mature the prototype for which support of Rs 10.0 Lakh each was provided. The prototypes so evolved were further evaluated by the eminent Jury comprising of senior officers of the Government, reputed academicians and eminent members from the IT industry to shortlist five applicants for building a ready to market product. The five shortlisted applicants were further provided financial support of Rs. 20 lakh (for three) and Rs. 15 lakh (for two), mentorship, testing and onboarding onto NIC cloud. Jury and Mentors comprising of eminent experts from Industry, Academia and Government provided extensive support to the Challenge on pro bono basis. The five finalist have pitched the solution and Jury which evaluated each of these products in detail and declared the winners.

The jury declared Vconsol, a product of Alappuzha (Kerala) based Techgentsia Software Technologies Private Limited as the winner. The winner of the challenge will be provided financial support of Rs. 1 Crore with additional Rs.10 Lakhs towards O&M for next next three years and will be adopted for use by Government through a contract.

In addition, the Jury also selected the products developed by three applicants as potential products and decided to offer a developmental contract to be supported by Rs. 25 Lakh each for further maturing their product within a period of three months. These three products will be further analyzed by a technical committee and subsequently Ministry of Electronics and IT will recommend to onboard all selected four products on GeM. Details of these three products are:

All the aforesaid Video Conferencing products will also be provided and support of STQC, CERT-In, CDAC and NIC. It has also been recommended that all four products will be hosted on NIC cloud and NIC will facilitate for adoption of these products for Government use through GeM.  All teams including winning team shall also be free to market the product globally.

This entire process of Grand Challenge was conducted with active participation from some of the best experts working as mentors and members of the jury. In view of this the Ministry of Electronics and IT, acknowledges the role played by President NASSCOM, Ms. Debjani Ghosh, Chairman Indian Angel Network, Mr Saurabh Srivastava, Mr Sharad Sharma of iSpirit, Dr. RajatMoona from IIT Bhilai, Professor Santanu Chaudhary from IIT Jodhpur, Professor YatindraNath Singh from IIT Kanpur along with senior officers of the Ministry.