Academia, startups, students, and researchers must partner to create new solutions: Vaishnaw

Union Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw has urged academia, startups, students, and researchers to come together to develop new solutions and shed the old mindset that the government should do everything.

While giving awards to winners of the Indigenous Web Browser Challenge and Chips to Start Up (C2S) programme, the minister said India has been a great service nation. Now, it should also become a product nation, he said.

"Old mindset where only certain government institutions would be developing everything has now given way to a new mindset, where academia, startups, students, and researchers must join together to create new solutions," Vaishnaw said.

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He also said services is a great industry that must continue to grow but, simultaneously, there is a need for India to also become a manufacturing nation.

"If you look at the entire spectrum of the chips that we need to develop, there will be many chips, which have a small value but large volume. There will be some which have mid-value and a mid-volume and some will have high value but very small volume. We have to play in the entire spectrum and that is the thought process with which we are moving," Vaishnaw noted.

The minister awarded the first prize of Rs 1 crore to Team Zoho, the second prize of Rs 75 lakh to Team Ping, and the third prize of Rs 50 lakh to Team Ajna for their work on the development of indigenous browsers.

Ministry of Electronics and IT (Meity) Secretary S Krishnan said indigenous browsers are required for the security of data within India, and there is a need for browsers that can be trusted completely.