Reflections from Bengaluru Tech and Skills Summit 2019
From Bangalore Tech Summit we got an invitation for participation and publishing about Navgurukul, so from Navgurukul 3 students — Ravina, Saakshi, and Priyanka and one of the core team members, Surabhi Yadav went to the conference.
NavGurukul
NavGurukul transforms the lives of students through coding skills, ensuring a job in the IT industry.
Lessons from the Conference
Bengaluru Skills Summit was organized by the Government of Karnataka which was a two-day session on 19–20th November 2019 at Bangalore Palace.
The Summit was started through a welcome speech by Dr. Selvskumar IAS and an inaugural speech by Hon’ble minister of Skill development Shri. Nagesh. The first half ended by the speech of Prof. S Sadagopanan, he said that India has two Is one is IIT and another one is ITI, according to him former is growing faster and the latter one is going slow.
The second half was started by an amazing speech by Mr. Kamal Bali, according to him business models are changing so we need to focus on digitalization, a narrative of sustainability and we need to think about the ethical environment. According to him we have 16 lakhs engineers in India but only 2 lakhs engineers got a good salary, he also told that machines will not snatch future jobs instead they will provide new jobs in a Different manner.
After Kamal Bali’s speech, Mr. Gaurav Kapoor spoke about the importance of soft skills. He said we don’t need to fear technology if we have good strength in soft skills. He also introduced his organization PanIIT Alumni Reach for India (PARFI)
The first day ended with a Knowledge Cafe — which was a group discussion on various topics.
In first half of the second day began with different topics that were spoken by Mr. Saurabh Tandon (Chief Operating Officer, Better Place Safety Solutions), Mr. Madan Palaki, Ms. Surabhi Yadav (Head of Strategy and Partnerships, Navgurukul) and Mr. Deepankar Bhattacharya, they all spoke little about their Foundation and related to their topics (Inclusion).
Surabhi spoke on inclusion in the skill development domain. some girls are so helpless that they don’t allow to go college just for petty issues. Facts told that India has the lowest participation of girls among Asian countries. All social and cultural factors will decide their future. She thought that sometimes skilling a person just for the sake of skill can kill their aspirations by offering them low-paying monotonous jobs. If a girl (who belongs to lower background) achieves something becomes a Breaking News. Inclusion is everything which is taking us from News to Norm. We are talking about those girls who are not here like transgender, who’s from a poor family, etc.
According to the fact among the workforce in the technology sector in India, 76% are men. She also called out the reflection of these statistics in real life by saying ‘you can count the number of women in this room on your fingertips’, ‘women in leadership are less in number by seeing the ratio of men and women speakers on stage right now ( 1:4).
According to her, inclusion = accessibility + sense of belongingness + quality outcome. The government is good at providing accessibility but is limited in the other two factors. Without the inclusion of marginalized communities, no problem would be solved effectively. So, enough is not enough and every experiment counts and then she relates the solution with Navgurukul.
Mostly they all told about different aspects of soft skills or transformation.
At the end of the summit, Dr. S Selvakumar IAS thanked everyone and highlight all discussions, after this Cheif Guest Rajesh Aggarwal IAS ended the summit by his great speech which includes maintenance of ITI and many great things.
Opinions of Sakshi -
We learned so many things in the Tech summit. When Mr. Sadagopanan told about that India has two I’s one is IIT and another is ITI but only one is growing. At that moment I thought that except these India has so many youths who want to join this field but they don’t have accessibility.
In the speech of different Speakers, I got to know that there is also tough competition in the engineering field. According to me if we want a high package so we need to be excel in a particular field and we have to develop our soft skills. We also need to think about the environment, what work we are going to do first we will think that what impact the environment faces if we do this work. Surbhi spoke about inclusion and gender equality. I get inspired by her speech as she is telling facts that relate to girls. Sometimes I am not able to understand some views as their speeches have some unknown words which unable to understand at that time and the summit was only accessible to limited people but we are thinking all youths who even didn’t know about that summit.
So, the conclusion is that if Govt. wants to organize the summit so they will provide accessibility to all interested people and speech should be in simple words and there is also the participation of all viewers.
The Exhibition
The conference had at least 100 stalls of various startups and companies.
Our main motive was to learn how to network and tell them about Navgurukul and know about their work. That's why we visited the stalls and spoke to them and took their cards and if required we also gave our contact numbers and mail ids.
While doing this we learned many things which is written bellow -
1) We saw in a stall where the person was playing cricket alone and it was showing on the T.V. It was a new experience for us that they use 3-D and mix of hardware and software.
2) In a stall, they made an App where we can do the shopping for dresses after trying it. It was like a mirror where we just have to click on the dress which we like and stand on the mirror and see it’s fit or not and shutting or not etc.
3) We met with a girl who is from stokal and she explained about her company and we also explain about our Navgurukul. Then she got to know that we are doing software engineering, she told that they are hiring people for a job as well and she offered us to send our resume too. It was useful ;)
4) We saw a Hello Robot. This Robot was greeting people hello. They had to work more on the model.
5) We spoke to an organization called Society For Innovation & Development and got to know that they fund to production/manufacturing companies only.
Opinions of Ravina
This was our first experience to visit the Exhibition and talk with different people in English, We were very happy to talk with people, to know their new ideas and tell about Navgurukul.
It was nice to make us realize again how much English is important. In the Campus(Navgurukul) we were quite irresponsible with English, even our seniors, and Team members were told again and again to speak in English and about soft skills but we were not following properly.
In the conference also Surabhi Di was reminding us that see and learn how much soft skills are important, here also they are telling about soft skills ;)
Thanks to Rajesh sir (I.A.S.) for inviting us:)
System and Decoration
We liked the food system, cleaning and how calmly they handled everything, it was really inspiring for us.
There was a music event going to happen in the evening at 6 pm but we were unable to attend because we had to come back.
There was a park nearby, where we went and clicked some pictures.
It was nice to see the Bangalore palace, we entered a room where we saw Chandelier light, which was awesome.
Opinions of Priyanka.
The overall experience of that conference was nice but a thing that can be better was the price of the entry ticket for that program. I am pretty sure that there must be more people who really wanted to join that conference but they were not able to come because of this reason only. Because of this reason, I think that they were slightly lacked for building networks with most of the other important people like the numbering of the women was less maybe because of some reasons or the reason which I have mentioned. We were very curious to know the knowledge cafe program there but when we search out and really wanted to hear about what we were not able to because they were discussing that within themselves and in a very low voice.
