The winner of the challenge will be provided financial support of Rs 1 Crore with an additional Rs 10 Lakhs towards O&M for the next three years

Union Minister for Electronics Communications and Law & Justice & IT Shri Ravi Shankar Prasad, announced Vconsol, a product of Alappuzha (Kerala) based Techgentsia Software Technologies Private Limited as the winner of the Grand Challenge for Developing Video Conference Solution.

The winner of the challenge will be provided financial support of Rs 1 Crore with an additional Rs 10 Lakhs towards operations and maintenance for the next three years and will be adopted for use by Government through a contract, said an IT Ministry release.

Besides, the jury also selected the products developed by three applicants as potential products and decided to offer a developmental contract to be supported by Rs 25 Lakh each for further maturing their product within three months.

These three products namely Sarv Wave from Jaipur, Insta VC from Hyderabad, and HydraMeet from Chennai, will be further analyzed by a technical committee and subsequently, the Ministry of Electronics and IT will recommend to onboard all selected four products on GeM as per the official statement.

Announcing the winners of the Grand Challenge, the Union Minister said, “I am delighted that Indian entrepreneurs and innovators have responded to the clarion call for AatmaNirbhar Bharat given by Hon’ble Prime Minister of India and have come up with some world-class video conferencing solutions in a short span of four months. We are committed to develop India’s software product and mobile app economy in a big way and efforts like this will go a long way in that direction.”

All the products will be provided support by STQC, CERT-In, CDAC, and NIC. It has also been recommended that all four products will be hosted on the NIC cloud and NIC will facilitate the adoption of these products for Government use through GeM.

All teams including the winning team shall also be free to market the product globally, the release said.

The Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology had announced an Innovation Challenge for Development of a Video Conferencing Solution under the Digital India Initiative on 12th April 2020.

The Innovation Challenge received an overwhelming response across the country, with a total of 1983 applications that were evaluated and subsequently supported through a three-stage process including Ideation, Prototype, and Product Stage, the ministry revealed.