A Conclave titled “Role of Innovation in Achieving India@75 Vision of a Developed India by 2022” was organized on 11th August 2015 at Silver Oak, India Habitat Centre, New Delhi by Confederation of Indian Industry (CII).

The idea behind the conference was to create a focused agenda of nation building and a universal vision shared by Indians and visions of an inclusively developed India that will collaboratively shape the world order through economic strength, technological vitality and moral leadership by the 75th year of its independence in 2022.

Prof. (Dr.) H. S. Dua, HOD, Department of Electronics & Communication Engineering and Dr. Aditi Paul, Asst. Professor, Department of Information Technology along with seven students from ECE (Sachin Kumar Verma, Nagendra & Rishabh Kesarwani , EEE (Chetan Prakash Kandpal, Abhishek & Ankit Kumar Yadav), CSE (Sushant Kumar Mishra) of Dronacharya Group of Institutions, Greater Noida attended the conclave.

The one day event was inaugurated by honorable Railway Minister, Shri Suresh Prabhu who started his speech by showing gratitude to late Professor, CK Prahalad (8th August 1941-16th April 2010). According to him the vision of India @75 was adopted by CII in 2008 as a grassroot initiative for realizing the dream of an inclusive, sustainable and developed India by the year 2022 when India completes 75 years of independence. The universal vision was developed using collaborative public reasoning process that evolved thousands of Indians across all geographies and all sections of society. He stated that, being a democratic country, 1.3 billion people of India is trying to work in a democratic way for their own needs as well as others. He mainly focused on two challenges that hinder the growth of India - water and land. The geographical challenge of water was addressed by innovation to preserve water for sustainable development. The challenges of land in India is again the geographical structure in which only 2.3 % is land and this incorporate hills, planes, sea coast, forests etc. Since land is required at every sector starting from housing to industry, there should be innovation in the proper use of land. The idea of sharing same land with no conflict was stated by the esteemed personality. Finally the Hon’ble rail minister concluded his speech by stating that the vision of India @75 is to transform India in next 25 years to be a developed nation.

In the first session, Ms. Jyotsna Sitling, Joint Secretary, Ministry of Skill Development & Entrepreneurship and Director General, NSDA, discussed about the areas where innovation is really required. She focused on skill development policies, schemes and mission in terms of input and output. She stated that sectoral analysis is important in order to find out the gap between the sectors where job requirement is very high and those where children drop out before completing their high school education. According to her it is important to set a course curriculum for industry and a responsive review to be made on that. Moreover, the smaller industries are to be integrated to Sector Skill Council where there is a vast scope of skill recognition.

Mr. Nish Acharya, Ex. Director US President’s National Advisory Council on Innovation & Entrepreneurship, in his valuable speech stated that skill is very hard to develop. Thus it is important to develop basic skill which in turn enhances itself in broader sense. He also added that in order to grow basic skill one has to think creatively out of the box.

Mr. Atul Bhatnagar, COO, NSDC, focused on the short term courses set by the industry. He highlighted those section of people who does not come into classrooms and speak in local language. There should specific standard to literate these people according to industry needs so that employability is grown up among them with each one having required skill. Finally he talked about mobile banking in order to highlight the necessity of using technology among everyone.

The second session was moderated by Ms. Deepti Dutt, Leader-government and smarter cities, IBM. The focus of the session was on Digital India-a mission to empower society and economy digitally with an idea to bridge the gap between those who need job and those who want to hire them.

The infrastructure layer was discussed by Mr. Manoj Davane, VP & Head –Technology, Government and Industry Relations- Ericsson India, who stated that infrastructure should be created, distributed, stored and used among the people and business. According to him each and every one of our country should have internet access in order to develop them. He stated that every person should have a digital identity which can be used as authentication. He also focused on how mobile banking serves the role of linking bank a/c with mobile phones digitally through Pradhanmantri Yandhan Yojna.

The service level was discussed by Dr. Rishi Mohan Bhatnagar, Global Head, Digital Enterprise Service, Tech Mahindra, who highlighted the fact of giving service to the targeted customer anytime, anywhere and through any device. He also discussed how to give service to the customer of a specific domain and create jobs through this. On one hand this would help the small need in households to be addressed smoothly while on the other hand it would generate employment for people at the grassroots.

Mr. Gaurav Dwivedi, Joint Secretary & CEO of MyGov, in his speech discussed about the strategies of MyGov - an effective platform where ideas can be transformed into reality. He talked about digital literacy by which services can reach the citizen in a seamless and transparent way. He also talked about the interconnection of databases at different sectors in order to make the services easily accessible to the people.

The third session, which was conducted by Mr. Ranjan Navani, Chairman, CII Council on India @75 focused on innovation in urbanization. The panelists of this session were Mr. Premjit Lal, Director, Ministry of Housing Poverty Alleviation, Prof. Amitabh Kundu, Chairperson-Technical Advisory Committee on Housing Start up and Mr. Abhijit Pawar, MD Sakal Media. All these esteemed personalities discussed about various issues related to urbanization and shared their ideas about innovation in urban areas.

The conference was very interactive and informative for academicians and Industrialists.

The conference ended with the closing remarks of Mr. Ranjan Navani.