The Rise of a Teenage Tech Titan

In Kochi, 15-year-old Uday Shankar is transforming the world of artificial intelligence. As the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Urav Advanced Learning Systems Pvt Ltd, Uday’s journey from a school dropout to an AI innovator is a thrilling tale of passion, perseverance, and impressive achievements.

The Summer of Choices

Imagine 10-year-old Uday standing at a crossroads between swimming lessons and robotics classes. “It all started during my summer vacation,” Uday recalls with a grin. “My mom gave me a choice, so I chose robotics.” Instead of relaxing with a typical summer pastime, Uday plunged into the world of tech. That summer decision? It was like choosing between a splash and a leap into the future.

Turning a Pandemic Pause into a Fast-Forward Play

When the world hit pause due to the pandemic, Uday hit fast forward. With schools closed, he immersed himself in Python programming, learning from YouTube tutorials and a Bellary Institute professor. He also completed the Certificate of Completion of Prerequisite Course for Serious Game Development with AI from MIT and the Certificate in Python for Machine Learning Neural Networks and Deep Learning from IIT Kanpur. His drive led to groundbreaking projects like 3rDi 4 All, an app designed to assist the visually-impaired, which was selected for the Kerala Government’s Young Innovator Programme. For Uday, what seemed like the world closing doors was an invitation to innovate.

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In a world increasingly driven by technology and innovation, young minds like Aakansha Jagga, a student of Vikas Bharati Public School, Delhi, are keeping up with the pace and setting new benchmarks. This young innovator has made significant strides in multiple fields, impacting communities in India, Nigeria, and the USA with her groundbreaking projects and passionate advocacy for STEM education.

AI-Driven Plant Disease Detection Tool

One of Aakansha’s most notable projects is an AI-driven plant disease detection tool. Developed in collaboration with Intel, this tool has already substantially impacted India. By leveraging artificial intelligence, the tool helps farmers identify and manage plant diseases more effectively. The result is improved crop yields and greater sustainability in agricultural practices. Till date, over 200 farmers have benefited from this innovative solution, highlighting Aakansha’s commitment to addressing food security and promoting sustainable agriculture.

Get the digital edition of the August 2024 issue to read the full article.

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In a world where finance stays an intimidating and complex topic for most, there exists a beacon of hope, a young and determined female entrepreneur, Kashvi Jindal. Her story is one of an insatiable curiosity for all things financial, and an unwavering determination to turn her fascination into a force for good. From discussing hedge funds to the humblest conversations with household staff, Kashvi’s journey is an inspiring one through the corridors of finance, illuminated by the mission to empower those who often exist in its shadow.

Ever since she was a child, the world of finance has captivated Kashvi Jindal. Growing up with a father who founded a hedge fund, she was exposed to countless discussions about business and market trends. Even as a child, she could be found eagerly asking questions about finance, despite not fully grasping the concepts. This early fascination with finance became the guiding star that led Kashvi to enroll in an AP Micro and Macroeconomics course during her tenth grade.

As Kashvi’s interest in money management grew, she began engaging in conversations about financial matters with people from various walks of life and household staff like housemaids and cleaning workers at her school. Through these conversations, Kashvi became acutely aware of a pressing societal issue — the lack of accessible information about finance and the economy. It was during these exchanges that her passion to make a positive impact was ignited.

This spark of inspiration led Kashvi to launch Invest The Change at the tender age of 16. This platform aimed to provide individuals with a fundamental understanding of saving and investing.

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The greatest treasure on earth is not found in the gold mines of South Africa, not in the diamond mines of Russia, not in the oil fields of Saudi Arabia. It is to be found in your mind. Your mind can make the greatest inventions, discover the most hidden secrets of the universe, write the greatest book, compose the most beautiful symphony and plan the greatest business. Many great minds and geniuses rest in the graveyard without realizing their potential.

“We are not creatures of circumstance; we are creators of circumstance,” quipped Benjamin Disraeli. Do not wait for the opportunity to knock at your door. Opportunities come wearing the garb of glitches and hitches. Innovators and entrepreneurs make use of this secret key to unlock great opportunities in adverse circumstances. In the world today if there are more problems like global warming, they offer us golden opportunities to be successful and to become great.

Recent studies have proved that creative people are happier than others and they make others’ lives also happier and better. The recent great innovators like Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg and Sundar Pitchai have made our lives more convenient and comfortable. Even people with more difficulties and disadvantages have turned those disadvantages into opportunities. The Australian-American Nick Vujicic, born without arms or legs, said, “I’m officially disabled, but I’m truly enabled because of my lack of limbs. My unique challenges have opened up unique opportunities to reach so many in need.”

In this issue of TTT, we have portrayed the success stories of young people who did not curse darkness but lit a lamp to make this world a better place for you and for me. The stories can awaken the sleeping giant in you with imagination and innovation which can create good news around you. Creative ideas come from putting other ideas together. Steve Jobs used to remark, “Creativity is connecting things”. People with great ideas are those who possessed a lot of knowledge from books and experiences from life. Great innovators are always voracious readers of books and magazines. The pages that follow will certainly motivate you. Wish you a happy reading!

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Raising a threat to China’s web conferencing solutions in the world market, Vconsol, a new product developed by a young web research and development company, Techgentsia Software Technologies Pvt Ltd, from Cherthala in Alleppey district of Kerala became the one-crore worth winner of the Prime Minister’s Innovation Challenge.

While announcing the winner on 20 August 2020, Minister of Electronics, Communications and IT, Ravi Shankar Prasad, noted that it gives an indication of the changing India where technological advancements can take place even in small towns. Thus, a locally-made Vconsol becomes an Indian solution to web conferencing while pushing down the entry of Chinese-American app Zoom and Google Meet and beating giants like HCL and Cisco.

The company will get financial support of Rs 10 lakh for the next three years for operation and maintenance and will be the official web conferencing solution partner for the Government of India during this period. When asked about the experiences of the company in the venture, its co-founder and CEO, 43-year-old Joy Sebastian humbly says: “It’s a team effort. The co-founder of the company, Tony Thomas, and CTO Ankur Deep Jaiswal have done a great job along with the entire team of 50 members to achieve this.”

The Indian achievement comes on the eve of a survival challenge in the global pandemic condition that hit India’s and China’s billion club population putting them in social distancing and travel restrictions for months along with other nations. Thus, quantum leap innovations of this kind from India are an indication of her potential to become an active player in world software technology market. “It is time for India to become a country where apps are also uploaded… Since video conferencing was an important instrument, we always discussed the possibility of a ‘Made in India’ video conferencing. The government is committed to developing India’s software product and mobile app economy in a big way and efforts like this will take us a long way in that direction,” the minister added.

To develop Vconsol was not an easy task for Joy Sebastian. “Security aspects of the product are a great concern for us. Vconsol is the result of a ten-year-long research of Techgentsia. While the government’s task was to develop a web conferencing solution that can actively participate 25 people, we developed a solution to accommodate 100 active participants and another 300 spectators at the same time. It will work even at a low internet speed. It does not require different video streaming for each person that enriches the data quality and ensures less data usage compared to other solutions,” Joy Sebastian explains.

The Innovation Challenge was open for participation from industries, start-ups and individual experts. The competition was held in three stages — Concept, Prototype and Product Stage. Among the 1,983 companies selected for submitting the prototype only 12 were shortlisted for the next stage and were given Rs 5 lakh to develop the prototype. In the third stage, five companies were selected and Rs 20 lakh each was given to three companies and Rs 15 lakh each for two companies to develop the final product in one month.

The homegrown video app, Chingari, is an answer to TikTok, which won first prize in the Aatma Nirbhar Bharat App Innovation Challenge in the social category and will receive Rs 20 lakh. The second and third winners are YourQuote, India’s largest writing app, and Koo News app, winning Rs 15 lakh and 10 lakh respectively. The jury identified 24 apps for prizes across all categories and another 20 apps for special mention. The app innovation challenge sought entries for nine different categories.

India’s call to boycott Chinese products in the wake of the Galwan Valley skirmish on 15 June 2020 that claimed the lives of 40 Chinese soldiers and 20 Indian soldiers, created an anti-China sentiment even at the local level. However, promoting desi solutions within a short period is practically very difficult due to India’s high dependency on China for parts, hardware and many other items. India has $75 billion worth imports from China every year. Hence, making India ‘Aatma Nirbhar Bharat’ is an emotional goal which cannot be achieved without engaging youngistan in boosting small scale local production in all walks.

A self-reliant India does not mean cutting off from rest of the world. Many start-ups and young IT companies have silently made an entry in the global market. As Joy Sebastian puts it: “We have clients worldwide. Europe-based Easy Meeting, U.S based Kaipura Inc. Corp., Brand Commerce, Ireland-based I-Connect are some of our clients. We give solutions to Mumbai-based Global One, C-dac in Trivandrum and ITI Ltd. Indian Startups are getting a momentum in the global market.”

Apparently, India has shifted her focus to many other fields to enhance self-reliance during the pandemic. The personal protective equipment (PPE) sector of India has grown from zero to 1,50,000 pieces a day in two months by the beginning of the month of May. It has a capacity to produce more than two lakh kits a day. The PPE industry in India is worth Rs 7,000 crore (U.S. $980 million) and in two months it grew second only to China. In another venture, India re-purposed her various automobile sector industries to collaborate in ventilator-making. Announcement of a ‘Made in India’ 5G network by Reliance Jio using 100 per cent homegrown technologies and solutions is another important shift.

Among many such shifts in the recent past, the relevance of success of Techgentsia is to be analysed for its vision to bring in a revolutionary change in the space of formal IT education. Joy Sebastian reveals, “My company gives more importance to talent pool than any reputation of an engineering institute. We are even not bothered to know whether the aspirant is an engineering graduate or not. Our team has employees who did not complete an engineering degree and some others have joined engineering college to get a degree after availing their expertise from Techgentsia.”

Adding more to its vision, he says, “Our company has a vision to rebuild the society around us. It is our social responsibility to engage in developing people around us to ‘hi tech locals’ by providing human resource and IT solutions for better community life. My preference is to give job to more people in my locality. When I failed to clear interviews of world companies due to my local flavour, I decided to bring the world into my locality.”

Efforts of Techgentsia could be re-read in a post-Covid world order as a company that makes a difference with its vision at par with the concept ‘Atma Nirbhar Bharat’. Its product, Vconsol, is the best example of ‘local’ becomes ‘vocal.’ In a country like ours where being elite means western-educated and being local is considered inferior, a vernacular-school-trained man from a coastal hamlet sets his goal in the world market, posing challenges to multinationals, using local human resources in the IT sector and showing that the way forward is to tame the dragon.

JOY SEBASTIAN “A voyage to strive, to seek, to find and not to yield!”

The voyage of Joy Sebastian, son of a fisherman, from Cherthala of Alleppey district of Kerala is ‘to strive, to seek, to find and not to yield’. Joy’s parents, Sebastian and Mary, struggled hard throughout the year to keep the pot boiling with their meagre income from seasonal fishing. Their children, Joy, and his elder brother, Job, were brought up in a government-sponsored one-room colony where education was a luxury. The parents had to choose between buying textbooks and day-to-day ration. A determined mother, Mary, always preferred spending on her children’s education to household expenses and even restrained her husband from buying an ordinary fishing boat of their own. The children could not think of new clothes or a good meal, especially during the rainy season. Their struggle came almost to an end when Job completed his polytechnic education and got a job. The family was on the verge of fortune when he got an appointment in a polytechnic college as a lecturer, but he died in a bike accident before joining. Struggling, Joy continued his MCA getting a scholarship from the company where his brother worked and with the support of friends, and by giving tuitions. He could not get through many interviews because of poor communication, as he had only vernacular schooling. “Even poor family background would have adverse effect on your talent during interviews,” Joy recalls. “That is why I decided to rebuild myself without having any support from corporate companies,” he added. Joy always keeps a village touch, and looked for quality and talent in the applicants to his company rather than looks and high grades. “Most of the employees in my company are from our locality as my vision is to give jobs to local aspirants and to give them a decent livelihood!” He started his office from home in 2007 getting assignments from a company where he was working. His company, Techgentia, was registered in 2009 with zero investment with a friend Tony Thomas as co-founder. Techgentia expanded in 2013, shifting the office to a hired building in Ernakulam. For more than a year, they had to really struggle hard, depending only on one client; slowly started getting more clients, also shifting the office to Info Park, Cherthala. From here the company started its success journey along with an array of international clients. With a desi touch and maintaining international standards, Techgentia has now won the one crore worth Innovation Challenge, beating HCL and SOHO and challenging web conferencing solutions like Zoom and Google Meet.

Courtesy: Indian Currents

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Opportunities and possibilities for innovation are all around us and businesses worldwide are striving to capture the market with a new product, an innovation or a unique solution to a pre-existing problem. Today, creativity and innovation are assets in all professions as consumers constantly desire new products. To quote Albert Einstein: “We cannot solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them.” As the rapid growth of technology solves and creates new problems the requirement in the workplace is for professionals who can bring fresh perspective to problems and think of novel solutions. Here are some ways you can encourage your own creativity to blossom:

1. Playful learning: Very often while learning we are encouraged to accept concepts as absolute truths. As if they are not open for query? But in reality the entire universe is evolving and so is the knowledge within it. A fun way of developing your creativity is to play games like “Just imagine if …” or ask questions like “What if …?” When you learn to playfully challenge old knowledge you are gradually training your mind to create multiple solutions to the same problem and to form novel connections between pre-existing pieces of information.

2. Imagine being rich and abundant: Sometimes, when we are trying to think of new solutions, we limit ourselves by the availability of current resources and shoot down ideas which require additional assets. This is a classic way of limiting our own minds and the solutions we provide. At the brainstorming stage of the project let your mind be loose and free. Write down all the probable solutions without limiting yourself by the practicality of the solution. Once all the ideas are jotted down you could then go back and see what resources are required. This complete free-style of thinking will again encourage you to develop the habit of opening your mind to all possibilities.

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