Winners of the Al Gore Sustainable Technology Venture Competition Announced
In a superb conflation of technological brilliance and management excellence, Brand IIT (Indian Institute of Technology) and IIM (Indian Institute of Management) shone at the 2009 Al Gore Sustainable Technology Venture Competition™ India, Asia’s first and most prestigious sustainable/clean technology venture competition, founded in 2007, and hosted by the legendary IIT Kharagpur November 6-7, 2009. The event was marked by the highest international academic bench marks, and India’s oldest IIT − IIT Kharagpur, conducted the event with characteristic flair and distinction. It is little wonder that 3 of the Fortune 500 CEO’s are graduates of this one IIT.
A stellar lineup of judges included leading venture capitalists, industrialists, entrepreneurs and academics. Prof. Oopali Operajita, Chair and Founder of the competition, says: “I am grateful to IIT Kharagpur’s’s Director, Prof. Damodar Acharya, for lending this competition his full and generous support from the very first day. Equally, I am grateful to Prof. Amit Patra, Dean of Alumni Affairs and International Relations, IIT Kharagpur, and Prof. Joy Sen, for their unflinching efforts towards making this competition a notable success. IIT’s Board of Advisors for the competition features major academic stars and it was an honour having them on board. There was a perceptible elevation of standards in this, our second competition, but that’s an artifact of having Brand IIT as our education partner. I’d like to thank Mercedes-Benz India and its CEO, Dr. Wilfried Aulbur, for sponsoring the competition, and Sajjan Jindal, Executive Vice President and Managing Director of Jindal Steel West (JSW) and ASSOCHAM for being our industry partner. Mr Jindal’s commitment to climate change is well known. All the finalists had excellent ideas and business plans.”
The First Prize went to the IIM Bangalore– IIT Bombay team of Abhijit Parashar (CEO), Roshan Agarwal, Gaurav Parashar and Abhishek Humbad for Energy and Carbon Productivity Solutions (ECPS), a product-based technology firm, focused on providing smart IT solutions to the clean technology sector in emerging markets. The team is currently ready with a set of Enterprise Resource Management solutions for the corporate and education industry. ECPS’s unique use of analytics, software solutions and web technologies make our products far superior to any of the existing solutions in the market.
The Second Prize went to IIT Kharagpur’s Manoj Kumar Mandelia (team leader), Mohan Yama, Prateek Kumar Jain, Shobhit Singhal and Pulkit Anand for LOCUS. LOCUS stands for “Localized Operable bio-Cells Using Sewage”, and is a green technology that is socially, economically and environmentally sustainable. It serves as an ideally integrated platform to simultaneously tackle the critical issues of wastewater treatment and energy scarcity. LOCUS makes use of a unique design to achieve higher efficiencies in treating wastewater and generating electricity from wastewater. Its delivery model makes it affordable and gives the customer incentives to buy and make use of this green technology. It also qualifies as a Clean Development Mechanism (CDM).
The awards were given away by the US Consul General in Kolkata, H. E. Beth Payne, who congratulated the winners, finalists and IIT Kharagpur, in her speech on November 7th. Congratulating Prof. Operajita on her unique idea, thought up in February 2007, which now has galvanized an entire generation of India’s brightest students into tackling climate change and energy security with sustainable tech business plans, Consul General Payne said the competition was, “the right step in the right direction at the right time.” For the full text of Consul General Payne’s speech, please visit the US State Department’s website, here.
