IT’s celebration time

The winners gather for a photo-op along with Chief Guest Ravi Shankar Prasad and other dignitaries

It was an evening to be remembered. A scintillating debate on the future of cards and whether digital transactions would soon obliterate them set the tone for the Express IT Awards 2018 held in Mumbai recently. Moderated by Financial Express Managing Editor Sunil Jain, participants Visa’s India and South Asia country head TR Ramachandran, SBI managing director PK Gupta, iSPIRT co-founder Sharad Sharma, NPCI MD & CEO Dilip Asbe and PwC partner and fintech leader Vivek Belgavi participated in the discussion.

(From left) TR Ramachandran, Group Country Manager, India & South Asia, Visa; Dilip Asbe, MD & CEO, National Payments Corporation of India; Sunil Jain, Managing Editor, Financial Express; PK Gupta, Managing Director, State Bank of India; Sharad Sharma, Co-founder, iSPIRT Foundation; and Vivek Belgavi, Partner, India FinTech Leader, PwC India, as part of the panel

Chief Guest Ravi Shankar Prasad, Union Minister for IT, Electronics and Law, said the government’s Digital India initiative was aimed at bridging the digital divide by providing the masses access to digital platforms. “From payments to education to medical health, the digital platform provides low-cost easy access to all, bringing about digital inclusion,” Prasad said. The Aadhaar and the digi locker systems, he pointed out, were examples of how the government was furthering the digital initiative in the country. The minister admitted that that the safety and security concerns came along with digital technology. The government is currently working on a data protection law to ensure that these concerns are addressed. However, Prasad said that any data protection law needs to be a fine, holistic blend between data availability, innovation, anonymity, utility, and privacy.

(From left) Union Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad, Anant Goenka, Executive Director, The Indian Express, and Vinod Rohira, CMD, K Raheja Corp

Coming to the selection of winners, although the list of 400-plus entries had been whittled down to just 50 or so by knowledge partner PWC, the task was nonetheless challenging. In each of the 50-plus entries that were discussed, a PWC team was on standby, in different parts of the country, to give a brief presentation and to answer the jury’s queries. The high-powered jury was chaired by Mohandas Pai. The other judges included Sharad Sharma, Siddharth Pai and Ravi Gururaj. The Express IT Awards, now in its sixth edition, attracted more than 400 entries. While Vimal Kumar of JusPay walked away with the Newsmaker of the Year award for his work on the BHIM app, Vineet Nayyar won the Lifetime Achievement Award for turning around Satyam Computers.