Dear friends,
Greetings from Bangalore!
I’m writing this post to share my experience of visiting Gujarat with three of my colleagues to present FluxGen’s work at Vibrant Gujarat Global Summit. I’m sure you would have heard of the event in the news and social media that it is an biennial investors summit organized by Government of Gujarat for business, trade and tourism promotion of Gujarat started by the incumbent Prime Minister of India and the then Chief Minister of Gujarat, Sri Narendra Modi in the year 2003. Before I go more into the event, let me tell you that next few weeks is probably the best time to tour Gujarat considering the amazing weather conditions. We had a chance to visit a few places during the visit.
Like previous Vibrant Gujarat Summits, this time also the event was hosted primarily at Mahatma Mandir located in Gandhinagar, however, to increase the impact and reach the organizers had one more location, Science City, to host the Futuristic Technologies Exhibition, Beyond Planet Earth Space Exhibition and STEM education seminar. We were fortunate to have been selected to exhibit our “AI and IoT Based Water Management System” at the Futuristic Technologies Exhibition at Science City. Along with us we had some really successful startups, SMEs and large organizations from various parts of the country. The exhibition also attracted multinational companies such as Amazon, IBM, Google, Philips, etc to exhibit at the event. The events in Science City was inaugurated on 17th January by Central Minister for Human Resources Development Sri Prakash Jawdekar. We had the privilege to present our product AquaGen to him along with the demo. He was very impressed to see the progress we have made and more importantly the potential impact of the solution for the country. The Gujarat State ministers and senior government officials accompanying him also showed great interest in our solutions and expressed interest in our product towards increasing the efficiency of water infrastructure in Gujarat State. For next four days we had visitors from various background coming from various parts of Gujarat, other states and countries. Through the event we found significant leads to customers, potential partners, potential distributors of AquaGen and also potential employees for FluxGen. I went with my colleagues Anand, Saurabh and Ranjitha. We took turns to show the demo and benefits of our solution at event.
The organizers gave opportunity to all the exhibitors to speak about the topic relevant to their work at the event. I spoke on the topic “Industrial Water Management using IoT and AI” on the fourth and final day, that is 20th. I took help of my colleagues to prepare the presentation for a general audience. I started my presentation by giving some important facts on water consumption to emphasize the need of conservation. While I did focus on our solution to save water and our mission to save a billion liters of water in next five year, I also did utilize the platform to ponder on the fact that we tend to spend exorbitant money on entertainment, gaming and other luxury items but when it comes to spending on water infrastructure management we become reluctant to invest — when we are seeing that water is becoming scarce day by day. I must say that I was very pleasantly surprised by the reception of my talk. A few of them came to me and told me that my talk really made a lot of sense. In fact we had more visitors coming to our stall post my talk. On the evening of the final day we had senior IAS, IPS and IFS officers from Gujarat Government attend the event. The Chief Secretary of Gujarat Government paid visit to all the stalls and spent time to understand the applicability of the technology to Gujarat State and for the benefit of Gujarat people. The Managing Director of Gujarat Informatics Limited, Dr. Sandhya Bhullar, IAS officer, took the VVIP visitors to each stall and gave a high level use case of all the products exhibited. In a way she made it easy for us to understand what the specific visitor would be precisely interested. I felt Dr. Sandhya was super gracious in promoting our work to the ministers and senior officers as she could see the scaled up version of our solution could greatly benefit the country at large. The event culminated with the valedictory function and dinner. All the exhibitors were given the participation certificate and a memento by the Chief Secretary, who also gave the valedictory speech at the end.
This post is incomplete without acknowledging the people behind the event and people behind us (FluxGen) getting the opportunity to exhibit at the prestigious event. The GIL team headed by Dr. Sandhya and the Science City team deserves huge credit for making the event a grand success. The organizing team shared the credit for the success with CoE-IoT NASSCOM, Gujarat University, DAIICT and E&Y for supporting the event in ways possible. I thank the CoE- IoT NASSCOM team for giving us the opportunity to exhibit. Navaratan Kataria Sir has been my mentor from NASSCOM for years — Many thanks to him for assisting me at the venue and on the presentation. I must mention that we would have never come to know of event or the possibility without Sruthi Kannan, program head of Cisco Launchpad, who referred startups from Cisco Lauchpad working on futuristic technologies. Thanks for your patience for going through the post. Some pictures of the event in the below link:
https://photos.app.goo.gl/SBNjSRurTA2dDP8m9
The 10min audio recording of my talk at the event below:
Regards,
Ganesh Shankar
Founder and CEO, FluxGen Engineering Technologies
Visiting Faculty, CCE, Indian Institute Of Science, Bangalore
