Startups – The KGP Chronicle

Hon’ble Education Minister Shri Dharmendra Pradhan visits IIT Kharagpur Research Park

To foster an ecosystem for cutting-edge research, commercialization of technologies, and strategic partnerships with industries in West Bengal, Hon’ble Union Minister for Education Shri Dharmendra Pradhan and Minister of State for Education Dr. Sukanta Majumdar visited the IIT Kharagpur Research Park in Kolkata on 20^th August 2024. The Research Park is a concept of integrated eco-system that provides research facilities including technical and infrastructure support along with other paraphernalia services. It focuses on R&D-driven innovation and product-oriented developmental activities using the institute’s wide expertise base and catering to the needs of the Nation and the interests of industry, entrepreneurs, and government agencies.

The IIT Kharagpur Research Park at Rajarhat, Kolkata, is a Section 8 Company, which is a globally recognized hub for innovation, research and technology transfer. With a built-up area of about 1.8 lakh square feet, a carpet area of 1.0 lakh square feet has been developed at Rajarhat, New Town, in Kolkata with funding from the Ministry of Education. It aims to emerge as a single window for national missions, start-ups, industry collaborations, host institutes’ incubators, R&D activities and outreach activities with different partners associated with the Institute and acts as an interface for the industry to collaborate on the commercialization of innovations.

The goals and objectives of the Research Park are to promote collaborative and interdisciplinary research through the sharing of facilities; Enabling technology transfer and commercialization of innovations; Supporting and incubating science and technology-based start-ups; Providing specialized training programs and workshops; Undertaking community outreach initiatives to promote awareness on scientific advancements; and Attracting international partnerships and projects to address global challenges.

The Research Park aims to facilitate the activities of academic units and Centres of Excellence at IIT KGP. Aiming to drive breakthroughs in science and technology research for the benefit of society through strategic partnerships and state-of-the-art facilities, the research park started a nursery industrial estate for small-scale industries at suitable places. It created a pool of sophisticated machine tools, analytical and test equipment, computers with semi-industrial processors and other facilities to support both industrial and central services to sponsored entrepreneurs.

At the same time, it will work with aspiring students, research scholars, staff and faculty members for technology and knowledge-based business development by hand-holding, ease of doing business, and providing IPR and patenting services, developing mechanisms to promote the dissemination of knowledge, cross-fertilization of ideas, and intellectual collaboration. Such interactions aim at enabling the creation of advanced technological solutions for the present and envisaged future industrial and social ecosystem.

During their visit, the Ministers took a tour of the state-of-the-art facilities at the IIT Kharagpur Research Park and met the TCS team of researchers and consultants. Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) has booked about 30,000 sq ft of space in the science and research park to house its research and development team.

Hon’ble Minister for Education Shri Dharmendra Pradhan took cognizance of the collaborative efforts of the 9 Higher Educational Institutions in West Bengal including NIT Durgapur, IISER Kolkata, IIEST Shibpur, IIIT Kalyani, Visva Bharti, IIM Kolkata, NITTR Kolkata, GKCIET Malda, and IIT Kharagpur in terms of research, technology transfer and commercialization, entrepreneurship, training programs, community engagement and infrastructure development. Shri Pradhan reviewed the intuitions, their academic performance, research projects, industry collaborations, rankings and ratings of IIT Kharagpur and other centrally-funded higher education institutions (HEIs) in West Bengal, as well as their future plans for growth and development. He also reiterated the words of Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi, urging the institutions to reignite the spirit of Nalanda, aiming to transform them into world-class knowledge hubs and contribute to the vision of “Viksit Bharat.”

Prof. V K Tewari, Director, IIT Kharagpur, remarked, “This visit highlights the continued focus of the Ministry of Education on strengthening India’s position as a global leader in education, research, and innovation. The IIT Kharagpur Research Park, with its advanced research capabilities and robust industry ties, plays a pivotal role in this vision. It fosters a dynamic environment for cutting-edge research and entrepreneurship, offering academic credits for start-up activities, supporting faculty-driven projects, and facilitating alumni startups through the EIR program and IPR licensing. Startups associated with the Institute or its technologies receive priority support.”

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By : Poulami Mondal, Digital & Creative Media Executive (Creative Writer)
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Alumni Innovate COVID-19 Health Technologies

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The cases of infections and deaths related to COVID-19 in India are increasing by leaps and bounds. While it took about 2 months to reach the first 1000 cases, it increased to 2000 just within 5 days, then with every 3 days the count has been increasing by 1000, and now the frequency of that occurrence has reduced to a day. Today the COVID+ cases have crossed 8000. Though experts concur that the lockdown has checked the spread of the disease till now to a considerable extent, the need for eHealth technologies is crucial in a country with a billion+ people under home quarantine. Four alumni starts-ups from IIT Kharagpur have developed technologies to offer assistance towards surveillance, mass-scale sanitization and automatization of dissemination of official information related to novel coronavirus.

Surveillance

Innovaccer, a data-driven healthcare technology start-up co-founded by Abhinav Shashank and Kanav Hasija from 2010 batch, has has launched a self-assessment based app to screen for COVID-19 patients. The self-assessment test asks users to fill in a survey based on their symptoms. It also provides coronavirus-related updates to citizens in the region.

“The COVID-19 pandemic has posed a serious challenge to current healthcare infrastructure. While our providers are tirelessly treating thousands of patients every day, we want to help them in this global health crisis by expanding their reach. To help the government, healthcare organizations and all frontline healthcare workers care as one, we are launching COVID-19 Management System to enable virtual care,” says Abhinav Shashank, CEO of Innovaccer.

Health authorities of Goa and Puducherry have tied up with Innovaccer to curb the spread of novel CoronaVirus pandemic with the Automated Self-evaluation Assessment to Identify At-Risk Patients for COVID-19.

In another such initiative, Intugine, co-founded by IIT Kharagpur alumni Harshit Shrivastava (2016 batch) and Ayush Agrawal (2018 batch), is using their flagship product ‘Mobile Number Location Tracking’ to monitor huge number of home-quarantined individuals and ensure they follow social distancing. The Kgpians claim that their location intelligence platform, which is based on cell triangulation technology, can work on SMS-based user content without installing any application, i.e. even on basic phones, which makes it easy to implement.

The company has recently announced that this solution can enable effective crowd monitoring of quarantined cases in a least intrusive and scalable manner, on a single dashboard with a central control tower, reducing the pressure on the ground teams to visit each location and ensure adherence.

“Our logistics platform fits seamlessly in providing a solution to the coronavirus monitoring. Upon understanding it better, we quickly tweaked our platform by conducting a pilot in a handful of districts to check the feasibility,” says Ayush Agrawal.

He confirmed getting positive response as well in detecting the breaches of home quarantined cases and reaching out to appropriate authorities who can put the platform to use for surveillance.

Mass-scale Sanitisation and Sterilization

While surveillance of the population is critical, a significant section of the population engaged in essential services are required to regularly access public spaces. Alumnus Debayan Saha collaboratively developed Airlens Minus Corona, a device which may help sanitise large areas. The innovators claim that the product might be able to address the challenge by using charged water droplets which are ionised using the viral discharge.

“Alcohols (like ethanol or IPA) are known to inactivate viruses by denaturing their protein coat. But the alcohol-based hand sanitiser is useful for individuals or for sanitising surfaces at a smaller scale (home, offices, etc.) in the fight against coronavirus. However, this is insufficient in such an emergency as it is impractical to use alcohol for sanitising cities,” said Saha.

The device is designed to look like Robo Sapien (human-like) machine that operates on the mechanism of charged water droplets which are ionised using the corona discharge. The ionised water in return oxidises the viral protein reducing it to a non-harmful molecule, opined the innovators. The innovators are hoping to reach out to organisations and government bodies for large scale application.

Bot

While media is reporting on health status, government announcements related to COVID-19, people may have queries regarding the lifestyle to follow beyond social distancing and hygiene guidelines. Apollonius Voicebot developed by alumnus Souva Majumder is addressing such queries. People can record their queries on the platform denguebot.in which are answered by an AI application. The bot has integrated information provided by the World Health Organization, Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, Govt. of India, and My Gov platform.

COVID-19 has reaffirmed the need for technology based hygiene and healthcare, which may not fade away with the situation normalising but rather lead to a future which cause less damage from pandemic, which may not require global lockdown.

This article only shares information about technological innovations by the alumni and is neither an endorsement nor can be used as a statement of validation for the above mentioned interventions.

If you are alumni, faculty or student of IIT Kharagpur and working in the following areas, please share your story on media@iitkgp.ac.in.

Personal protective equipment,
Surveillance,
Sanitization,
Testing kit,
Development of medical equipment, bots,
Pharmacological or non-pharmacological treatment,
Data analytics and AI to model epidemic patterns and disease dynamics

IIT KGP’s SATHI for Industries and Academia

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IIT Kharagpur has been selected for the SATHI Centre initiative of the Department of Science and Technology (DST), Govt. of India. This facility named as Sophisticated Analytical and Technical Help Institute (SATHI) Centre will be developed as a state of the art shared, professionally managed Science and Technology infrastructure facility. The primary objective of the centre is to extend help to the neighbouring academic Institutes, research establishments and the industries, particularly the start-ups and manufacturing units for using the state of the art sophisticated instruments, which do not exist anywhere else, in a few selected areas.

The SATHI Centre at IIT Kharagpur will comprise 5 strongly interconnected verticals: (1) Nano-Scale Imaging and Spectroscopy Facility; (2) Ultra-High Temperature Structural Material Characterization Facility; (3) Biological and Soft Materials Analysis Facility; (4) Quantum Opto-Electronics Measurement Facility and (5) High-Frequency Electronic Measurement Facility. The equipment and facilities proposed to be acquired for this Centre will cater to the ever-increasing and diverse need of scientists and technologists of the country.

An amount of ₹ 125 crore is earmarked for the centre for coming three financial years starting from 2019-20.

“The Institute is geared up to take this activity forward. We have already identified the requisite physical infrastructure for setting up this facility and we expect to start the activities for this Centre soon,” confirmed Officiating Director Prof. Sriman Kumar Bhattacharyya.

As per DST mandate, the SATHI Centre will run 24×7 round the year. At least 70% of instrument time will be reserved for external users from other academic institutes, national laboratories, start-ups, entrepreneurs and the industry. Along with IIT Kharagpur, IIT Delhi and IIT BHU have also been considered for similar centres by DST.

“IIT Kharagpur will treat the SATHI Centre as its Social Scientific Responsibility (SSR) programme to promote the culture of science-based Entrepreneurship and Startups in the country, by helping the users analyzing the results obtained from the instruments to achieve meaningful and scientific understanding,” opined Prof. Rabibrata Mukherjee.

The Centre would involve the highest level of expertise of IIT Kharagpur in several key convergence domains of Science & Technology such as Medical Sciences, Soft Materials, Structural & Safety Engineering, Quantum Photonics, Advanced Communication and Nano Technology. This will be added with excellent on-campus infrastructure, outreach centres in several metro cities, availability of trained faculty, student, postdoctoral and technical staff, ERP based research management system, Central Research Facility for internal and external users.

“With several of our existing industrial-scale infrastructure and the further up-gradation to the new infrastructure we are aiming for the SATHI Centre at IIT Kharagpur towards becoming a national centre of excellence, catering to the scientific need of the country,” added Prof. Mukherjee.

State of the art equipment to highlight a few will be installed as part of the SATHI unit:

Aberration Corrected High-Resolution Transmission Electron Microscope,
Kelvin Probe Force Microscope, Cryo-FESEM with Micro Raman and environmental imaging,
High-Temperature Furnace Mounted Universal testing Machine,
Stimulated Emission Depletion Microscopy (STED)
Super-Resolution Microscope, Color X-Ray,
Time-resolved fluorescence,
Raman and transient absorption spectroscopy,
Integrated Cryo-Electronic Testbed and more