Ravi Shankar Prasad announces "innovative challenge" to develop video-conferencing solution

Union Minister of Electronics and Information Technology Ravi Shankar Prasad has announced an "innovation challenge" for Indian start-ups to develop a video conferencing solution under the Digital India programme.

"Announcing Innovation Challenge for Indian startups and innovators for developing a world-class video conferencing solution. Urge the innovators, software product startups to come forward and take part in this effort," Prasad tweeted yesterday.

Addressing a press conference on Monday, the Union Minister said that due to the lockdown video conferencing has become very important in order to maintain communication between governments, to avail government services, businesses, education, etc.

"Ideas will be invited. The ideas will be evaluated and the top ten teams will be selected by a selection committee comprising experts from academia, industry, and government. Each selected team will receive a funding of Rs 5 lakh to build their prototype," Prasad said.

"After the teams present their prototypes to a distinguished jury to select top three entries. Each selected team will receive Rs 20 lakh to build their solution following the design principles and best practices," he added.

Prasad said that winning teams of stage 2 will get a chance to deploy a fully functioning product based on their working prototype at the government approved Cloud Environment, provided by CSPs impaneled by MeitY.

According to the challenge details, the winning team will get a contract to deploy their solution for use by Government of India, State Government entities for a period of four years and will also be given Rs 1 crore in the first year and an additional 10 lakhs per year for three years after the first year towards operations and maintenance of the solution for the government.