The Hindu : Tamil Nadu News : Finals for college students next month

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Saturday, Dec 11, 2004

Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu

Finals for college students next month

By Our Special Correspondent

CHENNAI, DEC. 10 . iTalent 2004, the finals of a competitive event to identify and showcase the talent of information technology students from regional/suburban colleges and enable their interaction with industry and potential employers, will be organised here on January 7 and 8 next by the Confederation of Indian Industry-Southern Region (CII-SR).

Colleges from the city as also districts in Tamil Nadu, besides a few from Kerala, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka, are participating in the event, whose inspiration lies in the success of the Managemantra series of programmes conducted by the CII-SR for students of management colleges and schools.

Project-centric

In the first stage of the "project-centric" IT contest, 413 students from 76 colleges submitted 146 projects. In the second stage, 67 project concepts were short-listed for detailed project reports. Twenty of these will be short-listed for participation in the finals to be held at the TIDEL Park Auditorium, where three top winning teams will be awarded cash prizes of Rs 75,000, 50,000 and 25,000. All other finalists will receive Rs. 1,000 and a citation.

`Maturity of thought'

Addressing a press conference here today, P.K. Mohapatra, chairman of the Education Subcommittee of the CII (and President-RPG Enterprises-Telecom Sector), said the topics selected by the student teams showed "maturity of thought" in terms of their social and economic relevance.

These included online facilitation of customer assistance in the hotel industry (styled Chalet), e-seva services for the rural citizenry, an intelligent system for management of traffic on congested roads, mobile control for gate opening, a multifaceted citizen card, a decision support system for supply chain management, vehicle tracking using SMS (short-messaging service) and a decision support system in health care. The "depth" of these concepts in terms of technology would be known on evaluation by the committee of experts.

Mr. Mohapatra said iTalent would not only facilitate industry and the academia to understand each other's needs better but also help IT sector employers recruit "non-metro-centric talent" (from students in the districts) and thus deal with the problem of mobility (or high employee turnover).

Ravi J. Shah, chairman, iTalent 2004 (and vice-president, Tata Consultancy Services), said 75 assessors from industry would be involved in the evaluation of projects presented in the finals. The steering committee for the event included IT majors such as Infosys, Satyam, Intel, Wipro, Sify, L&T Infotech, Allsec Technologies and Lason, besides Anna University. Projects chosen by teams could feature both hardware and software.

G. Kameshwar, member, CII Education Subcommittee (and principal consultant, TCS), said the participating teams would get an insight into the corporate environment through interactive sessions with alumni of suburban colleges working in reputed IT companies, human resource heads of IT companies and captains of industry.

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