BANGALORE: The Director of the Board of IT Education Standards (BITES), Karnataka, Prahlada Rao, on Friday said that the IT industry should be proactive in training students to make them employable after studies.

He was speaking at a function to felicitate winners of Project Invite (Initiative to Nurture and Vibrant Information Technology Ecosystem), an innovative academic initiative undertaken by IBM, in association with BITES and the State Department of IT and Communication.

He said Project Invite had proved that industry-institute interface was not only possible, but also successful.

Referring to Infosys Chief Mentor N.R. Narayana Murthy's statement that only 25 per cent of students coming out of colleges were employable and NASSCOM's survey that many institutes were not up to the mark, Mr. Rao said the onus was on the industry to have industry-institute interface. Project Invite was one such initiative where students directly interacted with customers and designed programmes and projects for them, he added.

Munidra Kumar Bhartee, Country Leader (Ecosystem Software Group), IBM, said that Project Invite would be expanded to other States from next year. It would be called as "Great Mind Challenge." Presently, the project was confined to Gujarat, Rajasthan and Karnataka.

Commending the students for their courage to take part in the demanding project, Mr. Bhartee said that he would not have participated in the programme as a student. IBM recruited many of the successful students in the project, he added.

Good response

The project developed primarily on Open Source software and Open Standard technologies has received good response with 600 students from 50 institutions participating in it. The project is aimed at creating a larger pool of technical experts among the students.

Some of the projects developed by the students include a placement portal, gram panchayat budget management system, generic hospital management system and Directorate of Technical Education's admission and scholarship management portal.

The top 10 teams of Project Invite were from BVB College of Engineering and Technology (two teams), Guru Nanak Dev Engineering College, Bapuji Institute of Engineering and Technology, Sri Venkateswara College of Engineering, Golden Valley Institute of Technology, M.S. Ramaiah Institute of Technology, C.M.R. Institute of Technology, Basaveshwara Engineering College and Alpha College of Engineering.

A panel of experts and faculty members in the field of e-governance and IT was set up by IBM and the Department of IT and Communication to judge the entries. The winners were judged on the basis of innovation in scenario, analysis and design, quality of code, applicability and success of the prototype and documentation. The prototypes developed by students during the project would be made available to the respective government agencies, solution providers and the academia.

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