7th April, 2023 Mumbai: Young minds from across the nation came for the Grand Finale of the highly anticipated e-Yantra Innovation Challenge (eYIC), hosted as part of the exclusive e-Yantra Symposium from April 5–6, 2023, igniting scientific excitement at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay. The Symposium brought together a large number of instructors and students from the e-Yantra Lab Colleges from throughout the nation in addition to the 10 finalist teams for the competition.
The e-Yantra Project has been preparing young people to learn and create technologies that can aid in forming a brighter future for everyone. It is supported by the Ministry of Education (MOE), Government of India, and is housed at the CSE Department of IIT Bombay.
The primary themes of the e-Yantra Innovation Challenge this year were sustainable and advanced technologies. for Promoting Agriculture and Urban Inclusivity, where Inclusivity Takes Care of People with Disabilities (PWD). Typically, the 2.2% of our population that makes up this segment has greater challenges to overcome. Young minds were brought together by the competition to share a single platform, giving them the opportunity to first study before deliberating on finding all-encompassing answers for a brighter and more inclusive future for everyone.
The Challenge gave students the opportunity to create multidisciplinary teams from various colleges and fields. The winning teams that successfully presented and prototyped their concepts may be awarded seed money to develop them further.
The two-day Symposium featured keynote addresses, workshops, panel discussions, and interactive sessions. It gathered all interested parties together to share ideas in order to develop young minds and inspire them to be “innovators for local disruption.”
The opening address was delivered by Prof. Milind Atrey, Dean (R&D), IIT Bombay, on the first day. Prof. Kavi Arya, the project’s principal investigator (PI), then gave a status report on the e-Yantra project. The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 implementation issues were the topic of the first panel discussion of the morning session. The panelists, which included Ashank Desai (founder and former chairman of Mastek), Prof. Rajan Welukar (vice-chancellor of ATLAS SkillTech University), Deepak Phatak (doyen of distance education in India), Dr. Vinod Mohitkar (director of technical education in Maharashtra), and other eminent educators and researchers, discussed and explored a roadmap for overcoming the execution challenges of NEP.
Highlights from Day 1 of the Symposium included the Innovation Challenge business pitch and display. Teams also had to present their working prototypes and vigorously defend them against the jury members’ probing questions about their products’ commercial and technical feasibility.
The professors of the e-Yantra lab colleges participated in an interactive session with researchers and academics from IIT Bombay. This proactive initiative aimed to improve the calibre of the interns and students from the participating colleges and to support their outlook on student research.
Together with DesignUp, an e-Yantra industry design partner, the company held a first-of-its-kind design workshop. eLSI lab colleges from around the nation were represented, together with young designers and engineering students and their instructors. According to Prof. Arya, the goal is to demonstrate to engineers how “design makes engineering edible.” While engineers are skilled at finding answers, designers are more accustomed to providing a user experience to clients, connecting solutions to society.
The Vande Bharat Express’s creator, Mr. Sudhanshu Mani, attended the Symposium on Day 2. He discussed with the attendees the history of the Vande Bharat Express, the lessons discovered along the development process, and the integration of technology, engineering, and design.
The principal investigator of e-Yantra, Prof. Kavi Arya, is an advocate of transforming students’ perspectives from “knowledge consumers” to “knowledge creators.” He asserts, “At e-Yantra, it is not contests that weigh in; rather, what we prioritise is bringing young minds to a level where they may learn to face challenges and find solutions to them. The only purpose of this symposium was to bring together all the participants in the expanding e-Yantra ecosystem under one roof to discuss current concepts for a better and brighter future. The two-day event also featured a number of e-Yantra efforts since its inception in 2009, and a number of entrepreneurs showed off the products that have emerged as a result.
The Challenge seeks to develop “student disruptor innovators for local disruption.” With the help of its involvement with all significant stakeholders, e-Yantra works to meet the objectives outlined in the National Education Policy. The engineering education system is supplemented with e-Yantra programmes to make students more employable and inclined towards innovation and entrepreneurship.
About e-Yantra: The CSE department of IIT Bombay is home to the e-Yantra project, a robotics outreach initiative financed by the Ministry of Education, Government of India. Since its inception in 2009, the project has helped more than 2,00,000 (2 lakh) students develop core technical skills like Robot Operating System (ROS), Drone Control, Machine Learning, Image Processing, 3D Designing, Embedded Systems, Control Systems Design, Functional Programming, Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) programming, Geographic Information System (GIS), Remote Sensing, and soft skills like collaboration, creative thinking, communication, and leadership. More than 3200 institutes in India and abroad have participated in the project. (Bhutan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh, Namibia, and Australia).
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