The Hon’ble Minister for Electronics & IT, Law & Justice, Ravi Shankar Prasad, launched a National Challenge for Youths, “Ideate for India - Creative Solutions using Technology”, at New Delhi today. The aim of this National Challenge is to give school students across the country a platform and opportunity to become solution creators for the problems they see around them and their communities.“Ideate for India” will empower and enable these students to transition from being ‘users’ of technology to become ‘creators’ of new indigenous technologies to solve local problems in their community by re-imagining solutions to work out critical local issues.The Challenge has been designed and launched by the National e-Governance Division, Ministry of Electronics & IT in collaboration with Intel India, with support from the Department of School Education and Literacy (DoSE&L), Ministry of Human Resource Development. The DoSE&L will help reach out to State Education Departments, NVS, KVS and CBSE authorities to propagate the National Challenge amongst schools across the country.Addressing the media at the launch event, the Hon’ble Minister for Electronics & IT, Law & Justice, Shri Ravi Shankar Prasad said “The National Challenge is well thought out and aims at conversion of dreams of children into ideas leading to the development of working solutions. I am hopeful that the top 360 ideas i.e. 10 top ideas from each of the 36 States and Union Territories will reflect possible and practical solutions towards solving local citizen centric problems covering welfare issues like agriculture, quality health, quality education, women safety, child safety, assistance to divyang, etc”.
The National Challenge is open to students of classes 6 - 12 all across the country - all 29 States and 7 Union Territories and aims to reach out to at least 1 million youth over the next 3 months. There are 11 core theme areas on which students can share their ideas- healthcare services, education services, digital services, environment, women safety, traffic, infrastructure, agriculture, social welfare, disability and tourism. The Challenge requires students to access online videos and understand how to identify problems and share a 90 second video explaining the problem and their proposed solution.From the submitted ideas in the form of videos, around 360 students (10 students per State & UT) will be selected by a panel of experts to attend 5 regional Boot Camps organized in North, South, East, West and North Eastern regions of the country ( 1 in each region). At the regional boot camps, students will get trained by technology experts and mentors to gain a first level/basic understanding of skills such as design thinking, ideation - idea generation, making, do-it-yourself concepts, collaboration etc with real time hands-on working sessions on basic electronics, robotics, 3D printing and introduction to IOT/Artificial Intelligence.Mentoring will be provided by experts at these camps to ensure that ideas mature as prototypes. The experts will select top 50 students who will be invited and felicitated at a National Level Event to showcase their prototypes implemented in communities and will be declared Tech Creation Champions.“Ideate for India” National Challenge will help inculcate innovation skills in youth and equip all students to utilise technology for the betterment of their communities and the society at large. Simultaneously, this will prepare them to contribute towards the realization of Digital India goals.