The mentoring program started with the 10 winners of the recently concluded Bangladesh-India jointly organized National Hackathon. About 30 innovators from the winning teams of “National Hackathon on Frontier Technologies” are participating in this month-long mentoring program with the aim of solving the most citizen-centric 10 challenges of Bangladesh by using information technology. Due to the Corona situation, the mentoring program will be held online and is being organized by the “Innovation Design and Entrepreneurship Academy (iDEA) project” under ICT Division with its Startup Bangladesh banner and the Indian IT- company Tech Mahindra Limited. A skilled and experienced team from Tech Mahindra’s Makers Lab will mentor these 10 startups in Bangladesh on a total of 17 important topics, including product development, business strategy, different frontier technologies, design thinking and CXO training. Once the corona situation is over, these Bangladeshi startups will be trained physically at Tech Mahindra’s Makers Lab in India by next year. Later on, after the maturity of the projects, they will be promoted in different countries of the world through marketing channels under “Tech Mahindra Limited” to help bring them to the growth stage.
In the light of this, On Sunday (August 9) the Senior Secretary of ICT Division of Bangladesh N M Zeaul Alam inaugurated the mentoring program with the winning startups in the hackathon which is jointly organized by Bangladesh and India. The father of the nation Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was honored with playing a special audio-visual on the occasion of Mujib Year at the beginning of the inaugural program organized online. As the chief guest of the program, N M Zeaul Alam said, “India is really doing great in the sector of IT. Information Technology in India is an industry consisting of two major components. These are IT services and business process outsourcing (BPO). The sector has increased its contribution to India’s GDP from 1.2% in 1998 to 7.7% in 2017. This is meaning that india is doing good in IT sector. At the same time, On the other hand, Bangladesh has also seen a tremendous growth in the information technology (ICT) sector in the last couple of years. He also added that through this mentoring program, startups in Bangladesh will gain more knowledge about modern technology and at the same time the relationship between these hosting organizations of both Bangladesh and India will be stronger.”
As a special guest, Sujit Baksi, president of Corporate Affairs of Tech Mahindra Ltd, India, thanked the ICT Division of the Government of Bangladesh and the “High Commission of India in Bangladesh” for making the event a success. He said that through the global business experiences of Tech Mahindra and mentoring by a skilled team to these startups from Hackathon, supreme efforts will be made to build them.
Executive Director of Bangladesh Computer Council (BCC) Parthapratim Deb, The Head of Global Innovation of TechM Mr. Nikhil Malhotra were present as the special guest of the program. The program was presided by the Project Director (Additional Secretary) of iDEA project Syed Mojibul Huq.
Besides, AVP and Function head of innovation Shreeni Chetlapalli, Head of Startnet & Campus Connect Umesh Kad, Customer Relationship Head- Makerslab Akash Dolas, Country Manager (Bangladesh) Debashish Mitra on behalf of the team of Tech Mahindra Ltd. and Deputy Director of iDEA Project Kazi Hosna Ara were also there at the opening time. Officers from ICT division were also attended at this opening program.
From 349 shortlisted innovative solutions from all the applications across the country, the top 51 teams consisting of approx. 150 innovators have participated in the hackathon. Forty mentors were there to guide all participants. Finally, the top 10 teams awarded as the winner at the closing ceremony of the National hackathon on 29 February 2020. High Commission of India in Bangladesh was the partner of the hackathon program.
