During freshman year at our college, Suvrakamal and I, fuelled by a shared passion for tech, dove headfirst into web development. From there, it was a non-stop journey of national and international hackathons.
I was the youngest to get the Dan Kohn Scholarship twice, attending conferences in Dublin and Shanghai. I was a Google Summer of Code 2023 mentee and will be a mentor this year. Suvrakamal excelled as a machine learning engineer at NeurologicAI and later as a researcher at Woxsen University, Hyderabad.
In 2022, while chatting with my childhood friend Rounak we realised how easy access to computing tools could transform lives. That's where ProjectX.Cloud comes in. We created InfinityOS, a cloud-based operating system. This lets even low-powered or outdated systems run demanding applications. Our journey to Ecell IITB, Asia’s biggest entrepreneurship summit, was possible because of this foundation.
We have received a cumulative grant of Rs 15 lakh from the Union ministries of electronics and IT, and commerce and industry. We received $200,000 in infrastructure aid from Google and the Innovation Award 2024, presented by the World Trade Center Mumbai. We were floored to be chosen for the prestigious Tiger Launch Scholarship by Princeton University in the US. This scholarship recognises ProjectX.Cloud as India’s best student-led startup.
Ronit Banerjee
Third year BTech, Academy of Technology, Hooghly
Women power
To celebrate Women’s Day, Techno India Group organised a panel discussion titled Ghore-Baire Sobai Sawman on March 12. On the panel were actor-director and advisor to the West Bengal Commission for Protection of Child Rights Sudeshna Roy, chief human resources officer and senior vice-president of Apeejay Surendra Park Hotel Sujata Guin, founder of Rakshak Foundation Chaitali Das, Techno India consultant Rupa Majumdar and co-chairperson of Techno India Group Manoshi Roychowdhury. Das spoke about the time when she was the only woman at board meetings. Roy shared a story of last week when she went to South 24-Parganas to save one little girl from being trafficked. The policemen were all hesitating but one woman constable bravely took the risk. That should be the spirit of society, she said.
Roy also spoke about the time when she was answering her higher secondary exams and her grandmother promised her a watch if she did well. It was the first time she felt that she was not less than anybody else. Guin emphasised that women needed to be resilient.
Kausik Chakraborty
Fourth Year, computer science and engineering,Techno India University, Calcutta
