If Union Minister Dayanidhi Maran failed to whiz through Chennai’s rain-battered IT corridor with Bill Gates, then Chief Minister Miss J Jayalalithaa ‘‘thoroughly impressed’’ the Microsoft chief with her IT and AIDS initiatives in the state and her proposals for further development. Ignoring Maran’s jibe yesterday about Chennai’s bad roads, the reason why Gates apparently could not drive to the TIDEL software park, Jayalalithaa played the perfect host today, discussing with him various issues relating to information, communication and technology even while praising him and his wife Melinda for their AIDS prevention programme in the state through the ‘‘Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’’.
On his part, Gates was ‘‘impressed’’ by the state government’s ‘‘effective implementation’’ of the AIDS prevention and awareness programme and reportedly told Jayalalithaa that Tamil Nadu ‘‘stood as a model’’ in this effort, officials said. He is also said to have ‘‘congratulated’’ Jayalalithaa for the success of the women’s self-help group movement in the state. Rohit Kumar, Microsoft India’s Country Director (Public Sector) later described the Jayalalithaa-Gates meeting as ‘‘very positive and warm’’.
While Microsoft’s plans to invest in the ‘‘Tier Two cities’’ in the country was surely under consideration, no decision had been taken on the issue yet, he said.
Jayalalithaa briefed Gates on TN’s blueprint for rapid development in the IT sphere, particularly in the rural areas in the field of health and education, and sought his backing for the state’s e-governance programme including taking computers to panchayats.
Jayalalithaa and Gates together launched ‘‘Project Siksha’’ to initiate teachers into computer training, who in turn would impart the knowledge to several lakh students of government schools. An MoU was signed today for the teachers’ training, part of a joint programme between Jayalalitha’s government and the Microsoft Corporation.
Jayalalithaa emphasised the need for a cheaper personal computer for spreading the IT revolution forward and sought Gates’ help to establish a ‘‘High Performance Computing Centre and an Engineering Product Design and Delivery Centre of Microsoft Corporation in Chennai’’.
Microsoft chief offers students a crack at Code 4 Bill
Bangalore: Bill Gates is offering Indian students their first shot at a computer programming competition, Code 4 Bill, where the ultimate prize will be an opportunity to ‘‘work directly with the Bill Gates technical assistants team at Redmond, Washington.’’ India is the first country where final and pre-final year engineering students will take part in the competition. The Microsoft Corporation chairman made the announcement at an event to showcase to over 2,000 developers the capabilities of Microsoft’s SQL Server 2005, Visual Studio 2005 and BizTalk Server 2006.
The event, in which 20 of the best will intern with Microsoft, while the numero uno will work with Gates at Microsoft’s headquarters is in recognition of India’s leadership in nurturing world class technical talent, Bill Gates said. Registrations for the ‘Code 4 Bill’ contest will commence in January 2006 and will comprise various stages that test technical and analytical skills over a period of eight months, Microsoft officials said. —Johnson T A