IndiaSkills Regional Competitions 2018 commenced today at Bangalore International Exhibition Centre (BIEC), Bangalore. The three-day competition witnesses 300+ candidates from 14 states - Kerala, Andhra Pradesh, Andaman & Nicobar, Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, Punjab, Jammu & Kashmir, Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Himachal Pradesh, Chandigarh, Madhya Pradesh and Odisha, competing in 36 skills namely Aircraft Maintenance, Floristry, Confectionary & Patisserie, Mechatronics, Mobile Robotics, Fashion Technology, Welding, Graphic Design, Web Designing, Cooking, Jewelry, Beauty Therapy among others.
The event was inaugurated by Mohit Dudeja, WorldSkills Silver Medalist in Abu Dhabi in 2017, along with Bhaskar Rao, Additional Director General of Police, Karnataka. The event was also graced by senior officials from central and state government including Jayant Krishna, ED & COO, NSDC, Ranjan Choudhury, Head WorldSkills India among others.
Aimed at promoting world-class standards in vocational education and training, IndiaSkills Competitions are organized by National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC) under the aegis of the Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship (MSDE). For the first time 22 States & Union Territories partnered with NSDC to organize 500+ districts and states competitions, which mobilized 50,000+ competitors across 45 skills. The winners from these competitions are competing at four regional competitions including the one at Bangalore currently. The winners from the regionals will compete at the National Competition in Delhi, where the winners across 45 skills will get an opportunity to undergo world class skill training and represent India at WorldSkills International Competitions 2019 in Kazan, Russia.
Speaking on the initiative, Bhaskar Rao, Additional Director General of Police, Karnataka said, “IndiaSkills Competition is a key step which recognizes the talent of our youth and drives them towards skills excellence. Today’s event marks the beginning of first IndiaSkills Regional Competition in Bangalore. I hope, through this initiative we will be able to positively contribute towards the growth of our country. It is heartening to see the enthusiasm and hard work of all the participants who are competing at this event. I believe the confidence that each participant will gain through this competition will help them improve their skills for a better future.”
Speaking at the event, Jayant Krishna, ED & COO, NSDC said, “It is a proud moment for us to host the first ever Regional Competition in South India. Bangalore has been at the forefront of skill development in our country and hence it becomes an obvious choice for our IndiaSkills Regional Competition. Through these competitions we have been able to provide youth a platform to overcome stereotypes and showcase their skills at the global platform. We hope, the participants competing here, not only perform their best but also use this as a stepping stone towards a more successful career.”
The opening ceremony began with a short film focusing on the journey of all the contestants from different backgrounds and geographies towards IndiaSkills Regional Competitions. Followed by an oath ceremony led by Kiran Kiran (from Bangalore), who won a Bronze Medal in Prototype Modelling at WorldSkills 2017 in Abu Dhabi.
For the spectators, it will be a revealing experience to see highly trained youth competing across different skills. The arena at BIEC will also see various activations and engagement activities for the visitors such as Try a Skill where youth could practice and explore a skill of their interest; Career Guidance Assessment by Mettl (an NSDC partner) which would help youth pursue a career in alignment with their skill set; an Innovation Gallery where start-ups will showcase their technology and products. IndiaSkills is also promoting exchange of ideas and experience in vocational training through seminars and panel discussions.
The Southern edition of IndiaSkills Regional Competition will conclude on 23rd June 2018, where the winners will be felicitated by Anantkumar Hegde, Minister of State, Ministry of Skill Development & Entrepreneurship, Government of India, along with other dignitaries.
With an aim to help farmers create more value for their crops and foster their socio-economic development, a project has been initiated by the Department of Agriculture, Government of Karnataka, in partnership with Bengaluru based Agtech start up, CropIn Technology Solutions.
The project will directly benefit 20 districts of Karnataka.
It will facilitate FPOs and farm managers to advise farmers in following the right package of practices across crops such as paddy, millets, gram and groundnut.
This joint initiative will soon be scaled up to assist 4.15 lakh farmers and cover over 3.4 lakh acres of land.
Even though Karnataka is home to the highest number of Agtechstart ups in India, the agriculture sector’s contribution to the state’s GDP has been declining with each passing year. This can be attributed to harsh weather conditions and seasons of drought witnessed in parts of Karnataka over the past five years.
As part of the mutual initiative, government will leverage CropIn’s farm management technology solutions to help farmers grow the right crops and adopt smart-farming techniques and practices, during the crop cycle.
Instead of just focusing on increasing per acre yield quantity, the government hopes to help farmers get optimal value for their yield – a measure to ensure the economic wellbeing of farmers.
“As an Indian Agtech startup, we feel a deep responsibility towards the wellbeing of the farmer community. This collaboration with Karnataka government gives us an opportunity to educate, enable and empower farmers. They are often at the losing end due to lack of transparency and information in the agricultural market. We hope to change this and bring about change at the grassroots level by working with the Department of Agriculture,” said, Krishna Kumar, CEO, CropIn.
In a similar outreach, CropIn had previously collaborated with the Department of Horticulture (DOH), Andhra Pradesh, in 2017 to digitise farms under two Farmer Producer Organizations (FPO) in the districts of Chittoor and Krishna.
Through this partnership, the DOH set out to build a platform for collaboration, increase the productivity of farmers and facilitate right market access for the farm produce. The underlying mission is to work towards doubling farming income by 2022, in line with the Government of India’s vision for the agri-sector.
In its first stage, the project covers over 210 acres of land, assisting 520+ farmers. After a successful run with two FPOs during the first year, the collaboration is now being scaled up to cover 50 FPOs.
In a world where most start-ups vanish without the funds, holding the grounds strong and growing at a phenomenal pace without investment funding is no less than a wonder. Morph.ai did the magic and what began with a demo product in March’16 has taken the shape of an exceptionally successful tech start-up with industry giants as their clients.
Top enterprises viz. Manchester City Football Club, Yes Bank, Yamaha, Motilal Oswal are clients of Morph.ai availing their state-of-the-art marketing tool that uses conversation and chat marketing for business growth and client servicing. The company opted for bootstrapping in lieu of Venture Capital funding to challenge itself for creating a successful product with limited resources. The core strength of the team was creating a strategy, planning, and execution of product development, an innovative approach for client traction and excellent customer services. The company in its initial phase focused on understanding the market and creating the best-in-class chat marketing system adapt to engage the customers and increase the business.
Impressed by the success of PokemonGo Chabot of Morph.ai, Manchester City Football Club was their first customer joining hands with the company utilizing the unique customer service and marketing technology. This was when the rocket launched into space and just within a year, Morph.ai had 12 industry giants and big enterprises onboard. The real magic was achieving this level of growth and success without an investment or funding.
The company has understood the need for personalized marketing and sales and is profiting the clients’ businesses with conversation and chat marketing on their landing pages and apps. After 1.5 years of successful growth of Morph.ai, the company finally took an expansion leap and had their angel-backed seed round in October’17 of $60,000 from Sumit Jain (Ex-CTO, HT Media and Jabong) and Sumit Chhabra (Ex-Senior from Sprinklr). The company has grown big and expanded the team for greater outreach in the market since then. In statistical terms, Morph.ai bagged $50,000 in revenues in just 5 months post the investment and earned yearly revenue of $100,000.
News reports from around the world including India are an evidence to the fact that child abuse is a global problem. Every School, Apartment, Home & community centres like malls need to feel responsible for Child Safety. HowToTellYourChild (HTTYC), founded in Bangalore in 2014 has developed a compelling program to build increased awareness among parents, communities. HTTYC content has both few and paid models that address topics as child sexual abuse prevention and also has a puberty model for girls and boys which helps them look at themselves positively.
Today HTTYC has visitors coming from 40 countries. HTTYC has worked for schools and communities from Vietnam and China by translating its content in Vietnamese and Mandarin and are currently working on translating the Child Safety Module content in Hindi & Kannada. HTTYC also has partnerships in Nigeria and Hong Kong.
Besides the above UNFPA in Vietnam used HTTYC videos for their social media outreach to which have received an overwhelming response. HTTYC gave its content to UNESCO & Women’s & Child Museum in Hanoi. HTTYC is also working with UNESCO in trying to bring its child sexual abuse prevention education module to schools in Vietnam.
Said Deepa Kumar, Founder, HowToTellYourChild, “ it is overwhelming to see the response we have received for our content from all over the world. From a Montessori teacher in Mexico using it in her school to Vietnamese National TV broadcasting our content every day. It makes me proud to see the difference we are making, we have over 150 schools around the world that use HTTYC content.” She further added, “it would be a dream come true if education system make our content mandatory for teachers training as well as make it a part of the school syllabus to educate and make the children aware about their safety.”
“Establishment and growth of a bootstrapped start-up is no less than a herculean task. It takes a lot of everyday grind, hustles, and work-pressure, but the success achieved by the hard-work is the most rewarding one, especially impacting people and businesses positively with your work. Achieving your targets while working out of your comfort zone gives a great opportunity to learn, create, grow and expand a business successfully“, said Pratik Jain, Co-Founder of Morph.ai.
Jain further added, “When Morph.ai was kickstarted in 2016, the main hurdle was to find customers without investing in marketing. During the initial phase working with minimum salaries and fewer resources, forced the team to look for better marketing ideas. The search led to the conclusion that conversations work. Sharing ideas, talking to people and networking led to the exposure of the company and the quality product with best services helped Morph.ai to attain success.”
The angel investor Sumit Jain was greatly influenced by the customer-centric approach of Morph.ai and the growth aspects with future potential galvanized him to invest in the expansion of the company. Jain said, “Morph.ai is truly the start-up of the new generation. Of all the investments I have done, this is a unique and talented team. These young fellows are simple, creative and really smart. I love the tech they are creating.”
Furthermore, the investor and mentor, Sumit Chabbra praised the start-up business model of Morph.ai and said, “The kind of traction this small team had generated without any investment was amazing. They continue to keep their clients happy and there's nothing better than that. The dedication at work and their belief in the product is phenomenal.”
An idea that can revolutionize the business world and make an impact is worth trying with a start-up. Investment and VC funding should be used as expansion tools only because bootstrapping in initial phase gives a deep understanding of the work field, target clientele, product/service design and business strategy.
Capital Float, the largest digital lender in India, unveiled its app-based Consumer Finance solution. By using this paperless product, partners can offer Capital Float’s instant, no-cost EMI option to consumers at the point of sale. The company’s tech-driven algorithms underwrite the consumer in real-time, ensuring instant approvals.
“We have carefully built this product over the last year and are fully operational across 75 cities in India. We are witnessing exponential growth in terms of disbursals and on an average, are adding 15,000 new consumers every month, aiming to cross a customer base of 200,000 by the end of this year through this financing solution. We have already partnered with over 250 companies across verticals such as education, vocational training, wellness, elective healthcare, home furnishings, electrical equipment, lifestyle, travel, fitness and consumer durables. We’re witnessing tremendous growth by adding 25-30 new partners every month,” said Sashank Rishyasringa, co-founder, Capital Float. “Our partners too, have experienced a substantial increase in sales, up to 40% in certain cases, along with a substantial increase in average ticket size of sale since the introduction of our products,” he added.
The Consumer Finance solution operates on a digital model, wherein the application process is completed in under three minutes. Consumers needn’t swipe their credit cards or pay upfront. Instead, they can opt for the convenience of paying via EMI by applying for the loan during purchase.
Gaurav Hinduja, co-founder, Capital Float said, “The new-age Indian consumer is curious, informed and accepting of new financial products and services, which in turn is boosting the consumer lending sector, the potential of which is estimated to be between $10 Bn-$12 Bn. The app-based, paperless process is designed to provide the highest degree of convenience to the partner and consumer while transacting at the point of sale. Furthermore, the uniqueness of our products extends to verticals wherein consumers are typically under-served. For instance, by using our product, a customer can avail of elective healthcare facilities like weight loss, hair transplant or IVF which are normally not covered under regular insurance products. We’re currently disbursing a loan every five minutes with offerings across 1300 outlets. Given the potential of the market and our offering, we are confident of doubling our growth this year in terms of customer acquisition and point of sales.”
Through its Consumer Finance solution, Capital Float offers small ticket size loans to consumers aged between 23 – 60, with an average loan value of Rs 50,000 and tenure of 6-12 months for repayment. The loans can be availed for a variety of uses including paying tuition fees, financing travel packages, dental treatment, fitness packages, buying electronic appliances and computers, etc.
SocialCops, the New Delhi–based data intelligence company, was selected among hundreds of candidates as one of the World Economic Forum’s Technology Pioneers. With this selection, SocialCops joins an elite community of companies from around the world that are poised to have a significant impact on business and society. Past winners include Airbnb, Google, Kickstarter, Mozilla, Palantir Technologies, Spotify, Twitter and Wikimedia.
SocialCops was founded in 2013 by Prukalpa Sankar and Varun Banka to enable leaders to use data intelligence to confront critical global challenges. Since then, their technology platform has been used in scenarios as diverse as driving rapid village development, tracking national welfare schemes, and optimizing marketing campaign locations. Their work spans different sectors with partners such as the United Nations, Government of India and Unilever. In 2017 alone, their data intelligence platform processed 11 billion data points and touched the lives of 1 of 25 people in India through their projects and partners.
The World Economic Forum’s Technology Pioneers community are early-stage companies from around the world that are involved in the design, development and deployment of new technologies and innovations. “We welcome SocialCops in this diverse group of technology pioneers,” says Fulvia Montresor, Head of Technology Pioneers at the World Economic Forum. “SocialCops and its fellow pioneers are front and centre in shaping the ongoing Fourth Industrial Revolution and we believe they will be transforming society and industry in a positive way in the years to come.”
Following its selection as Technology Pioneer, Prukalpa Sankar, co-founder of SocialCops, will be participating in the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting of the New Champions. This meeting, also dubbed “Summer Davos”, will be held in Tianjin, China, from September 18-20. Many Pioneers will also attend the Annual Meeting in Davos, in January 2019, and continue to contribute to Forum initiatives in the course of the next two years.
“We are honoured to be acknowledged as a Pioneer by the World Economic Forum and join a cohort of global game changers like Palantir & Airbnb”, said SocialCops Co-Founder, Prukalpa Sankar. “When we founded SocialCops, we wanted to democratize data and make it possible for millions of organizations in the world to derive the kind of value from data that only financial institutions and Silicon Valley giants are capable of deriving today. Organizations at different stages of their data journey can use our platform to drive decisions both big and small. We want to use this award as an opportunity to keep engaging with global stakeholders in government and society, as well as in business, to help adopt data-driven systems and increase their impact.”
The Technology Pioneers were selected by a selection committee of more than 60 academics, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and corporate executives. The committee based its decisions on criteria including innovation, potential impact and leadership.
This year’s cohort is the most diverse ever, both geographically and in terms of gender. 25% are female-led, and a majority (54%) come from regions outside the United States and Silicon Valley, with each continent represented, barring Antarctica. There is also a wide variety in the technologies the pioneers focus on — the focus technologies include artificial intelligence, big data and internet of things (IoT), biotechnology, blockchain, autonomous vehicles, cyber security, vertical farming and other agricultural advances, decentralised microgrids and robotics. The full list of Technology Pioneers can be found here.
More than one in five adults work for companies that are deploying artificial intelligence (AI)—and while these employees generally view AI positively, they also have concerns about its potential effects on their privacy, job security, and economic equality. In fact, AI users are both more optimistic about AI’s benefits and more wary of its risks than nonusers. Those are the central findings of a survey of more than 7,000 people conducted in Canada, China, France, Germany, Spain, the UK, and the US by BCG GAMMA and Ipsos, a market research firm.
AI Is Not Coming—It’s Already Here
AI adoption varies widely among countries. In China, 31% of survey respondents say they work in organizations that already use AI, followed by North America (26% in Canada, 24% in the US) and then Europe (20% in the UK; 18% in Spain, 16% in France, and 15% in Germany).
Adoption also varies by sector, but to a lesser extent. A quarter of the workers in manufacturing say that AI is deployed at their companies, compared with 20% in construction, 19% in retail, and 18% in services. The average rate across private sector organizations stands at 20%, whereas 25% of public sector respondents say that AI-enabled tools and applications are already in their workplace.
People Have a Positive View of Increasing Use of AI-Enabled Tools
The vast majority of employees—especially those who already have access to AI—expect it to have positive implications for their organization and for themselves.
In workplaces that use AI-powered tools, more than two-thirds of the employees surveyed say the tools have already had a positive impact on their efficiency (75% cite improvements in their effectiveness, 75% in their results, and 74% in how their work is structured). They also note that AI has had a positive impact on the appeal of their work (70%), on their level of well-being at work (69%), and on the training courses made available to them (67%). A large majority of respondents, regardless of gender, age, or occupation, mention these positive effects.
Workers who have already experienced the benefits of AI tools are even more enthusiastic than others with regard to the likely the impact of AI over the next five years. More than eight in ten think that it will positively affect their organization (84% say it will have a positive impact on their organization’s business growth, and 81% say it will improve the structure of work). More than three in four also expect positive benefits for themselves (77% with regard their level of well-being at work, and 76% with regard to their professional development).
Although people who don’t already have access to tools enabled by AI are less enthusiastic, they remain largely positive about the idea. The same applies to countries, depending on where they stand on the path to AI revolution.
The most advanced countries, such as China, Canada, and the US—but also Spain—view the probable impact of AI most positively. Other European countries are more cautious, but still see it positively for the most part.
Big Efforts Needed to Get Everybody on Board
Despite their generally positive opinions about AI’s impact and outlook, people do have serious concerns that companies must address. Fears and concerns don’t simply disappear when people become familiar with AI-enabled tools; indeed, more than three in four people are worried that using AI at work may result in more supervisory control and surveillance in their workplace (82% of people in organizations already using AI think so). This concern is especially high in China (84%).
More than two-thirds of surveyed workers fear that AI will eventually lead to job losses due to a reduced workload (the percentage among employees who already use AI is 76%). Many (65% overall, and 71% in places already using AI) are also afraid that AI will dehumanize work, resulting in reduced social cohesion, and foresee AI-related ethical problems with regard to the protection of personal data (64% overall, and 71% where AI is already in place).
To this point, organizations implementing AI tools have not discussed these concerns in depth—which is all the more reason that they should do so now. Only 40% of the employees interviewed say that their managers have discussed the organization’s development of AI and its digital transformation with them (only 32% where no applications of AI are available yet).
A substantial majority (79%) of employees in workplaces where AI is already familiar expect their managers to make statements and decisions about it. Others have lower expectations, largely because they are unaware of how important AI has become as a strategic issue in most organizations.
This explains why less than one person in three believes that the development of AI will revolutionize their workplace, and why 42% think that it will impact only certain companies and certain business sectors, rather than the entire economy.
Sylvain Duranton, global leader of BCG GAMMA, warns against adopting a complacent, business-as-usual attitude toward AI. “Underestimating the size of the AI phenomenon and being unprepared for the digital transformation could leave organizations at great risk. Individuals and managers need to get ready for the AI revolution—which is already here—and to take full advantage of it for survival and growth. Otherwise, they risk being crushed by the power of the wave,” he says.
Methodology: Ipsos carried out the study for BCG among 7,077 people in the active population, including a minimum of 1,000 people in each of the seven countries surveyed (Canada, China, France, Germany, Spain, the UK, and the US,). In each country, Ipsos interviewed a representative sample (quota method) of the national active adult (18 and over) population. Ipsos conducted the online survey between May 18 and June 6, 2018.
