Keeping with the tradition of promoting talent at their alma mater, [/i]’89 batch of IIT Delhi has instituted the Practical Innovation award for the B.Tech. and 5 Yr. M.Tech. students at IIT Delhi. There could have hardly been a better candidate than the Aadhar[/i] chairman and Padam Vibhushan Nandan Nilekani to launch this award. To get hold on this prestigious award and prize money of Rs. 2 Lakh, students need to produce a work of genuine innovation that benefits masses, especially weaker segments of society.
On this Nandan Nilekani, an IIT alumnus himself spoke about the importance and necessity of creative products across different fields. He elaborated on the challenges faced during the implementation of UID project and the innovation models that his team came up with to resolve them. To implement the project at a speedy rate, Aadhar set ‘Registrar’ system in place. As there are 70 different agencies or Registrars there, they will compete with each other to get their share of revenues for successful issuing of Aadhar Ids. He also gave some insights on how technology will be used at an unprecedented level and safeguards in place to avoid misuse of technology. He highlighted the contribution of interns, sabbaticals and volunteers for the project and termed it Human resource innovation.
Adding colour to the celebrations of the IIT Delhi golden jubilee year, the honourable director of IIT Delhi, Mr. S. Prasad, also announced the setting up of Foundation of Innovation in Technology Transfer (FITT), which will finance innovative ideas of fellow IITians.
The awards are dedicated to late Dr. Partha Niyogi and late Mr. Samir Anand, (both of whom were students of the class of ’89). Mr. Rahul Bhargava , another ’89 pass out and an instrumental figure in setting up this award, stressed upon practicability, scalability, benefit to Indian people and realistic enough to be executed as being the judging [/b]criteria for selecting the winner for this award. Mr. Ashwani Sharma contributed generously to have this award in place.
Mr. Nilekani answered audience’s questions thereafter. As usual, he was interactive during the question session also. Because of shortage of time, though lots of hands raised had to go back with their questions unanswered. Mr. Nilekani summed up his speech with the words, “Innovation happens when you get stretched”. The statement was one of the highlights of the event which was a rare colosseum[/b] of a perceptive crowd and the applause it generated was proof enough of the fact that innovation is at the heart of IIT Delhi culture.