Intel & DST Innovate for Digital India Challenge 2.0 to encourage innovation

In line with its vision to create a sustainable ecosystem of innovation in the country, Intel India has announced the Intel & DST Innovate for Digital India Challenge 2.0 ("Challenge"). Presented in collaboration with MyGov, Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeITY), and T-Hub Foundation, this year’s Challenge also aims to inspire grassroots innovation and harness local talent, by inviting makers across India to build solutions to accelerate India's digitization and commercially develop their prototypes on Intel Architecture.

Debjani Ghosh, Managing Director, and Vice President, Sales & Marketing, Intel South Asia, said, "Innovation is the key ingredient for making the Digital India vision a reality, and we need a local, sustainable innovation ecosystem, to address the country’s challenges. Our goal is to foster innovation at every level - from school to colleges, and from entrepreneurs to enterprises. With this announcement today, we continue to create a community of makers who build solutions to enable the scalability of technology adoption in India, and increase the impact of technology on citizens’ lives. Through strong public private collaboration, wherein MeITY, MyGov, T-Hub, and Intel India are working together to turn ideas to solutions, disruptive yet sustainable technology innovations are now a reality."

This initiative adds to Intel India’s larger goal of enabling technology innovation in the country, for students, entrepreneurs, and any other makers, who are passionate about creating viable solutions to address everyday problems, related to sustainable access to healthcare, livelihood, and finance, faced by citizens.

K.T Rama Rao, Minister of Information Technology, Government of Telangana said, "It is heartening to see public private collaborations, such as the one between Intel India, MeITY, MyGov, and T-Hub, driven towards building a long-term innovation culture in the nation. I am certain that this initiative will bring some breakthrough ideas and ingenious innovations to the table, and strengthen India's position as a knowledge economy."

The Challenge encourages the creation of easy to use, and scalable solutions to address the challenges of the country through automation and technology. It invites solutions that integrate IoT, and cloud technology to enable digital transformation experiences in the areas of agriculture innovation, healthcare access, financial inclusion, and sustainability. It is open to aspiring and existing entrepreneurs, innovators, academia, designers, engineers and makers from diverse backgrounds.

This year, the Challenge will roll-out in five phases, with the grand finale taking place in April 2017. Shortlisted teams will be eligible to receive a INR 3,00,000 grant each, to create minimum-viable products (MVPs) based on Intel Architecture (iA) in an accelerator program at the T-Hub incubator in Hyderabad.The winning team will walk away with INR 20,000,00 to further their project development.

Besides the Challenge, Intel India is also accelerating hardware design & innovation through the Intel India Maker Lab. In fact, from last year’s Challenge, seven of the top 20 participants, including the three winners, used the Maker Lab to develop and test their prototypes. Currently, there are 17 startups utilizing the lab facilities for projects in the areas of education, sports, health, agriculture, BFSI and e-governance across IOT, Cloud, and client compute.