Wipro, Nasscom Collaborate To Skill Indian Students In AI, IoT

Indian multinational corporation Wipro, in collaboration with the National Association of Software and Services Companies (Nasscom), will be setting up a platform to train students in emerging technologies — artificial intelligence (AI), data science, internet of things (IoT) and cyber securities.

Wipro has decided to take up the initiative under its corporate social responsibility (CSR) programme, TalentNext, that aims to enhance the quality of engineering education in India by training college faculties and academic leaders, who will later train students.

The platform, set up by Wipro and Nasscom, will be looking to train 10K students from over 20 engineering colleges in India. The first phase of the programme was introduced by Nasscom’s president Debjani Ghosh and Wipro’s Chairman Rishad Premji.

With this platform, the duo wants to build a talent pool of students certified by Wipro and Nasscom and provide them with greater job opportunities. Wipro’s Chairman Premji, in a press release, said that the platform will bring together content and people, alongside the focus on curation and learning at one’s own pace.

Just three months ago in September, the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur tied up with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to build an AI-related resource platform  — National Artificial Intelligence Resource Portal (NAIRP). With this, IIT K and AWS want to provide an accessible and reliable resource for AI learning and research.

“The contributions from AWS will enable us to provide cloud computing to all learners and reduce the high barrier to make training in AI more available,” former IIT Kharagpur Director and Professor Partha Pratim Chakrabarti has reportedly said.

Then in October, the Andhra Pradesh government decided to establish its first skill development university with over 25 colleges in the state. The government will be setting up one college in each election constituency to make it accessible by the students. With this move the government wants to improve the learning among students pursuing industrial training, polytechnic, engineering and other technical courses.

In addition, even the government’s think tank NITI Aayog has previously proposed to set up a cloud computing platform, AIRAWAT (Artificial Intelligence Research, Analytics and knowledge Assimilation platform), to support the advancement of AI-based developments. Moreover, it also proposed to invest in 20 international centers to develop and deploy application-based research.

Even the National Skills Development Corporation (NSDC) has collaborated with the World Bank to launch a data platform to aggregate skilling data from all central ministries, states and corporations. The government wants to ensure that it has a record of skill development in Indian across the sectors, gender, social, and geographic landscape.