The Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay has launched the e-Yantra Innovation Challenge (eYIC 2022-23) to seek solutions for inclusive urban infrastructure. Winning teams who successfully pitch will receive seed funding from a prize pool of Rs 1 crore. There are also 25 lakh worth of prizes to be won.
The e-Yantra project is funded by the Ministry of Education, Government of India, and hosted at the Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) Department of IIT Bombay. This year’s themes are Sustainable and Advanced Technologies for Helping Urban Inclusivity and Agriculture. Inclusivity here caters to Persons with Disabilities (PWD), who constitute almost 2.2 per cent of our population.
The e-Yantra Innovation Challenge (eYIC) is an annual competition that trains student teams in crucial skills through Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) before getting them to solve real-world problems and build start-ups. It was started in 2014 and this year marks the ninth year of the e-Yantra Innovation Challenge. For the past few years, on an average, 2,000 students have participated in e-Yantra’s Innovation Challenge.
Principal Investigator of the e-Yantra project, Prof. Kavi Arya from the Dept. of Computer Science, IIT Bombay, said, “The e-Yantra Innovation Challenge brings young minds together to work on real problems to seek solutions for building a better tomorrow. Majority of the students have skills but don’t know which problems to solve nor how to solve them. For that, e-Yantra engages participants in immersive learning on thematic areas where experts help them articulate relevant problems they could solve. They are then guided to develop prototypes and subsequently trained in pitching to incubators to learn to launch their own start-ups.”
The e-Yantra Innovation Challenge is divided into four stages. Stage I is a training sprint that familiarises participants with the theme, trains them in technologies and helps them articulate problems with training through MOOCs and live sessions by experts. Stage II is a Prototyping Sprint where teams work under e-Yantra mentorship to build a prototype of their proposed solution. Stage III is an Innovation Sprint where e-Yantra helps develop a pitch to an incubator —here, the IIT Bombay Incubator SINE. The last stage is an Implementation Sprint, where teams refine their Proof-of-concept (PoC) under the guidance of e-Yantra mentors.
The e-Yantra Innovation Challenge gives participants a platform to launch their own start-ups with incubation support from the IIT Bombay Incubator SINE.
