Techies’ database to now include others too

The eight month old portal – http://www.techpedia.in – is run by a 5-member team of engineering students with support from former CSIR Director-General R A Mashelkar and Professor Anil Gupta from IIM-A and has over one-lakh projects from across India.

The portal’s coordinators have now decided to engage management,design and law students – who can register their services on the website. The new initiative will be mainly directed towards small and medium enterprises interested in picking up their projects.

The new initiative will be included on the website when it is re-launched in early February. Management,law or design students can submit their resume and credentials,and the coordinators will link them to the engineering students to work on a module together and market the project further.

“Any student from any college in the country can register for this,” said IIM-A Professor Anil Gupta.

Techpedia already has a mentor network of 2000-plus engineering professors to help students further develop their projects if an industry shows interest.

But the new move was considered so as to get more students from other disciplines involved to promote campus-industry linkages,said Professor Gupta.

He added that after six years of meeting and lobbying for such an arrangement with officials in the Ministry of Small and Medium Enterprises,nothing came through from the government’s side.

This was one of the reasons why the initiative was finalised and accepted at a meeting last week without further attempts to ask for the ministry’s involvement,he said. “I have met all the senior officials at lest 10 times to no avail,” he added.