CHENNAI: The Insurance Solutions Centre of Tata Consultancy Services launched a focus group to push insurance into the curriculum and create more awareness of jobs in the sector, Satish Varma, head of ISC, said, during an academic summit held on Tuesday.

The unique initiative was to create an interface between industry and academics, he said. "Insurance as a curriculum is just coming up and there is a growing need for professionals. There are more private insurance companies coming up and a lot more job opportunities coming up," Mr. Varma said. By 2010, the industry would need to have a huge supply of professionals, he said.

Thomas Simon, head of HR, TCS, said that currently about 40 per cent of engineering students and 70 per cent of arts and science students lacked employability standards. The idea of the initiative was to create an awareness of the needs of the industry and provide for greater industry-institute interaction, M. Somasundaram, Principal Consultant, Insurance Solutions, said.

As Sathish Varma said, "Engineering students do not have finance-related subjects in their curriculum. The projects they do are not relevant to the current needs of the industry. The projects are neither useful to them nor us."

Paper presentation

During the academic summit launched to kick off the initiative, about 30 teams from various colleges presented papers on insurance-related technology.

The judges shortlisted eight entries and graded them on content and presentation skills.

The winners, Mohamed Ibrahim and Mohamed Kabiruddin, third year computer science students from Crescent Engineering College, had come up with an innovative solution for speeding up the verification process in accident detection. "We wanted to bring in new technology that will revolutionise the insurance sector," said Kabiruddin. "The longest process is the verification. It takes days to get back the money," Ibrahim added. The students proposed the use of GSM technology used in mobile phones to facilitate on-the-spot verification.

Innovative ideas

The paper presentation contest also resulted in students coming up with innovative ideas involving grid computing, customised operating systems on insurance and technologies dealing with standards and integration. Deans and heads of about 10 colleges participated in the interactions and panel discussions.

"The innovation required by the Insurance Solutions Centre can only come from increased academic interaction," K. Padmanabhan, Vice President and Global Head of Insurance Practice, said.

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