As part of its TechNgage initiative The NASSCOM IT Services Council [NITSC] organized a two-day hackathon [21st and 22nd May] in Bengaluru to offer working professionals and students an opportunity to create solutions that provide citizens an intelligent and connected infrastructure to cater to various social needs to citizens in education, health and safety. With the theme Your CITY – SMART & SECURE, the hackathon will also be held in Pune, Hyderabad, Chennai, Delhi-NCR and Kolkata.
Aimed at helping India become the hub of innovation and to enthuse technologists to continuously evolve and become ‘World Class Techies’, the Council has identified several initiatives and TechNgage, is part of one of the key initiatives – Celebrating Technology & Technologists. The hackathon has witnessed over 14226 registrations already and top submissions focus on issues like – Citizen services, Education and Healthcare.
The selected winners along with cash prize of up to USD 15,000 will also get be conferred with a NASSCOM fellowship which will provide blanket passes to all major forums hosted by NASSCOM and access to all member-only research reports and material for 1 year. To help them hone their skills further, the winners will also be felicitated with an all-expenses paid trip to Silicon Valley where they will get the opportunity to visit top technology companies for one week.
Talking about the innovative idea, Sushma Rajagopalan, Chair, NASSCOM IT Services Council said
With TechNgage, we aimed to provide highly skilled people in the country a platform to support their budding innovations; which will play a massive role in the growth of the sector and development of the country. This hackathon is one step closer to that vision and looking at the number of registrations, we are confident that we are going to get ideas that are going to help us build a stronger technology enabled ecosystem.
Samir Dhir, Member, NASSCOM IT Services Council stated that
It’s heartening to see level of participation, quality of ideas and enthusiasm of talent in our country during Bangalore TechNgage. We believe TechNgage provides the right platform for technologists in India to showcase their ideas and innovations and with help of NASSCOM transform lives of fellow citizens, demonstrate to world power of innovation from India & pave way for future technologists to build further.
The hackathon will support the IT sector in building an ecosystem that will enable emerging skills become mainstream. Since its inception, NITSC has become a crucial part of NASSCOM, and is focused on building a sustainable and profitable growth path for the Indian IT industry and help IT companies take advantage of the impending IT revolution.
The other key initiatives identified by the Council include:
- Creating an eco-system of IT services companies and start-ups
- Building India into a digital hub
- Policy advocacy with focus set aside for smaller businesses
- Converged world and how it is going to impact IT Services
- Build next generation leadership in the wake of digital disruption
- Enhancing Quality of employee base
- Changing the market perception of Indian IT services/solutions
About NASSCOM
NASSCOM is the premier trade body and the chamber of commerce of the IT-BPM industry in India. NASSCOM is a global trade body with more than 1800 members, which includes both Indian and multinational companies that have a presence in India. NASSCOM’s member and associate member companies are broadly in the business of software development, software services, software products, consulting services, BPM, e-commerce and web services, engineering services and animation and gaming. NASSCOM’s membership base constitutes over 95% of the industry revenues in India and employs about 3.5 million professionals.