Digital India focus of tech fest on final day

Tribune News Service

Roorkee, March 20

Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Roorkee, concluded its three-day annual technical festival themed ‘Cognizance 2016’ here today.

The final day’s focus was on Digital India campaign and how to make India digital. Earlier, discussions, lectures, competitions and other events marked the first two days of the festival. The three-day event, inaugurated by Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar, has been a tremendous success as an entertaining and enlightening event, claims the institution.

The festival included various programmes and comprised of comprehensive varied and relevant discussions on start-ups, Digital India and integrating government campaigns such as Make in India into the defence sector.

The final day commenced with ‘national signature dish’, a competition to bring various regional dishes of the Indian subcontinent into limelight on the lines of MasterChef India. The judge to choose the most delectable dish was Aditya Bal, host of Chakh Le India series on NDTV Food.

An event on Digital India Campaign was another attraction of the day as panel discussions and guest lectures were held. The campaign aims to bring the power of internet to empower people across the nation. Digital India Campaign is redefining the relationship between government and the stakeholders of society like industry, academia, citizens and others. Need to develop new infrastructure, expansion and upgrade of existing infrastructure was discussed. There is a need to use learning from the private companies to work in harmony with government and social institutions to help write new success stories, the students were told.

The panellists of the discussion were some of the pioneers, including Jaijit Bhattacharya, Partner, KPMG; Abhay Vaish, CTO, Ericson Global Services India; Gyana Parija, head, IBM Research Centre of India; Himanshu Gupta, Director of Startegic Accounts at Fuzzy Logix India; and Rohit Gandhi, Chief Editor, Zee Media as moderator.

IIT, Roorkee, claims ‘Cognizance 2016’ as the second largest technical festival of Asia. “An ISO9001:2008 Certified Event, Cognizance and its endeavours have been recognised by UNESCO, FAO, IYP, UN Women and many other national institutions.” Cognizance has a unique reputation of catering to students from diverse backgrounds and disciplines by addressing the technical and managerial concerns at the industrial level.