Team ‘Aces’ comprising of four 4th year undergraduate students, Anubhav Goyal, Anush Gupta, Lakshya Kalra and Shreshtha Mundra of IIT Kharagpur secured 1st place in the finals of the PAN India HULT Prize competition held at IIM Ahmedabad on January 9.

Top 30 teams from all over India had pitched their ideas to a panel of 13 eminent judges.

They will be competing against 50 other teams from across the globe at the Regional Finals of HULT Prize Competition 2016 being held at Boston, for a prize money of $1 million. The other finalists include teams from other prestigious colleges and universities like Harvard, MIT, and Yale.

The teams were asked to suggest ideas to double the income of people living in crowded urban areas within 5 years. The winning team ‘Aces’ had come up with a mobile application along the lines of Mechanical Turk to provide these people with a means of stable income by utilizing their non-productive broken time.

The app basically has simple questions based on image categorization and text verification. The team will provide this data to research groups and companies that require this preliminary data processing and transfer the monetary benefits to the people in crowded slums. Yes we are planning to initiate these ideas. Firstly the team will conduct a pilot in the month of Feb and this pilot will be the integral part of our pitch at Boston. The development of the mobile app is in the beta stage and is being handled by one of our team members.

The entrepreneurial spirit of Kharagpur can be estimated from the fact that 5 of the 30 teams at IIM Ahmedabad and 2 of the top 3 teams were from IIT Kharagpur.

Team Sanyojan comprising of Ayush Garg, Kartik Pal, Pradeep Kumar Mittapally and Pradyumna Mishra bagged the 3rd prize and will be competing at the Shanghai Regional Finals.

The idea of Team ‘Sanyojan’ was to provide B2B Services and promote local entrepreneurship along a Co-operative Society Model Supported by an Extensive Tech Platform and Micro-financing Schemes. Sanyojan’ works on a cooperative society model to provide a holistic solution. Our enterprise focuses on providing B2B services by connecting people, both skilled and unskilled, with businesses like Contractors, Security Agencies etc. Workers, employed through our enterprise, give back to the community by training other people for similar jobs.

The HULT Prize is organized by HULT International Business School in partnership with the Clinton Global Initiative and is largest student competition globally to solve the world’s toughest social challenges.

The Hult Prize Foundation is a start-up accelerator for budding young social entrepreneurs emerging from the world’s universities. Named as one of the top five ideas changing the world by Former US President Bill Clinton and TIME Magazine, the annual competition for the Hult Prize aims to create and launch the most compelling social business ideas—start-up enterprises that tackle grave issues faced by billions of people.

Winners receive USD1 Million in seed capital, as well as mentorship and advice from the international business.

source: http://www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com / The Times of India / News Home> City> Kolkata / by Jhimli Mukherjee Pandey / TNN / January 20th, 2016