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At a time when Zoom has become synonymous with Video Conferencing, the Indian Government is inviting local technology companies to build a secure video conferencing solution as part of the Make in India initiative. The announcement says

With more than half a billion internet subscribers, India is riding high on the digital front. All facets of the economy are leveraging technology for wider reach, convenience and effectiveness. The sudden outbreak of COVID-19 has made Digital the most important part of our daily life.

Government of India is taking all necessary steps to ensure that we are prepared well to face the challenge and threat posed by the growing pandemic of Corona Virus. The outbreak has led to the unprecedented enforcement of lockdown throughout the country. The concept of Work From Home (WFH), which was till now mostly synonymous with IT industry has become a household term. With Organizations having asked employees to WFH, video conferencing has become an integral part of daily life.

The Indian government recently published an advisory stating videoconferencing software Zoom is “not a safe platform”, joining other countries that have expressed concern about the security of an application that has become hugely popular worldwide during the coronavirus lockdown. (link: Reuters)

The Innovation Challenge is open for participation in teams having experts from all domains of a software development life cycle. It would be in three (3) stages:

1. Ideation (Stage-1): Teams will have to propose their innovative and cutting edge ideas of their solution. Top 10 teams would be selected from this stage. Each team will receive a funding of INR 5 Lakh (about US$ 7,200) to build the prototype.
2. Prototype (Stage-2): Build the prototype of the solution. These shortlisted entries from Stage-1 will get a chance to present their prototypes to a distinguished Jury. Top 3 teams will be shortlisted for the Final Stage. Each team will receive a funding of INR 20 Lakh (about US$30,000) to build the solution.
3. Solution Building (Final Stage): The winner will get a fixed amount of INR 1 Crore (about US$ 150,000) along with certificate from the Hon’ble Minister of Electronics & IT towards deploying the solution for use by Government of India and State Governments for a year and further support @ Rs 10 lakhs per year towards Operations & Maintenance.

A few Official references about the challenge 

• mygov.in link to register for the challenge with terms and conditions
• Webinar on Innovation Challenge for Development of a Video Conferencing Solution (register by 21 Apr)

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More details about the challenge

The Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology announced an Innovation Challenge for Development of a Video Conferencing Solution under the “Make in India Initiative.” The application is expected to have features like:

• Should support all video resolutions and audio quality, should work in low and high network scenarios
• Should be low on usage of power/ processor
• Should not have any external hardware dependency
• Should work on any device
• Should have chat option during conference, even the multi people conference
• Should have sign-in and non-sign-in options to join a conference
• Can be browser and/or app based interface
• Should have encrypted network communication
• Should have audio/ video recording feature
• Should have screen/file sharing capabilities
• Should allow audio to close captioning during chat (multilingual)
• Should have capabilities to host multiple concurrent conferences having multiple participants in each conference