With the advent of technology and the emergence of new sectors, there has been an explosion of career options for students to choose from. However, due to lack of relevant information and guidance, students make career choices that don’t suit them. In a survey conducted by an online platform, of the 10,000 students in the age group of 14-21 years, 93% were aware of just 7 career options. Likewise, parents too lack awareness about professional and vocational pathways available for their children. In addition, 93% of schools in India do not have a dedicated professional counsellor, and consequently, students from middle and low-income households do not get the career guidance they require. Between 2020 and 2030, India will add 101 million people to the working age group. A key enabler to utilise this enormous demographic dividend is career guidance, and this will play a vital role in building a better skilled and more satisfied workforce.
iDreamCareer.com (iDC) is a career guidance and counselling company that guides students towards achieving their most suited careers. iDC has a database of well-researched content on more than 570 career pathways, 25,000 colleges and 1000 entrance exams and scholarships. The iDC online portal has more than 1000 hours of career content while the iDC app provides personalized content based on the student’s context and aspirations. This content is complemented with a psychometric assessment that makes students aware of their aptitude, personality type and interest areas. This is followed by one-on-one counselling sessions with certified career counsellors. Counselling guides the student through a career fitment process of assessing the most suitable options, both in terms of next steps in education and longer-term careers. Once chosen careers are defined, iDC has a college application program that supports the students in profile building, scholarship information, helpline support on colleges, and live counselling.
India is the second largest producer of wheat and rice – world’s major food staples. India is also currently world’s second largest producer of several dry fruits, agriculture-based textile raw materials, roots and tuber crops, pulses, farmed fish, eggs, coconut, sugarcane and numerous vegetables. 58% of India’s population depends on agriculture as their primary means of livelihood. 85% of India’s farmers cultivate in less than five acres of land, half of which, in many parts of India, may be rain-fed. Small farmers contribute 51% of agricultural output with 46% of operated land. However, these farmers face severe challenges such as low productivity, natural calamities, perishability owing to poor cold chain logistics, and weak access to higher paying markets.
Farm Folks procures fruits and vegetables from smallholder farmers at their farm gate. It provides residue-free fresh produce to online and offline retailers, and offers on-farm advisory from sowing to harvest for select crops. Farm Folks also educates farmers in globally accepted agronomic practices (GAAP) to help them realise a better price for their produce.
In 2016, India ranked as a global leader in the number of students graduating university, with around 78 million graduates. However, of these only 2.6 million or 3.3% were STEM graduates. Later, by the year 2018, India had almost 32% students picking up STEM learning. This upward trend of STEM education is directly linked to the employability rates among Indian graduates: STEM degrees like Bachelors in Engineering or Bachelors in Technology had the highest rate of employability. However, despite an array of advantages, India still has a gap in skilled workforce when it comes to STEM.
Various research reports have shown that learning levels for students from low-fee private schools and government schools are consistently below grade level. These gaps are particularly evident in Maths and Science. There are different types of learners with different learning styles in one classroom. Therefore, a variety of learning methodologies (experiential learning) and technology (personalized learning) need to be leveraged to close the learning level gaps. This could include activities and labs for science and hands-on manipulatives for math.
Curiositi Learning Solutions creates high-impact solutions that help students learn the fundamentals of STEM – Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics. They have an extensive range of STEM technology, kits, and games that encourage children to problem-solve, innovate, and create.
With 260 million school-going children and alarming drop-out rates, delivering grade-level learning requires significant changes in current teaching methodologies. It needs to be supported by an innovative pedagogy that uses interactive technology and advanced learning tools to deliver creative and critical thinking, which is crucial to the development of students into confident and lifelong learners.
Chrysalis is one of the leading full school solution providers. As an integral academic partner to schools, it provides books, question-based learning materials focused on cognitive development, teacher assistant tools, tech-enabled granular student assessment, ICT activities to engage parents, and home learning applications. Their flagship product – Think Room – creates transformative learning experiences.
When it comes to Textbooks vs Think Room, Chrysalis is way ahead. Regular textbooks are filled with chunks of texts with no activities. The questions in classroom textbooks are such that they promote rote learning, while in the think room, the information is presented through colourful images and activities so students understand and retain what they’ve learned. Sub-activities and questions ensure that concepts are thoroughly understood. In Thinkroom, plain text is minimal and they look like colourful comics that students will be eager to pick up even when they are not in the classroom. Simple and easy to understand, Think Room takes care of knowledge, understanding, application and skill building.
India’s diverse climate ensures it can produce a variety of fresh fruits and vegetables. India ranks second in fruit and vegetable production in the world, after China. As per the National Horticulture Database 2020-21, India produced 102.48 million metric tonnes of fruits and 200.45 million metric tonnes of vegetables. The area under fruit cultivation stood at 9.6 million hectares while vegetables were cultivated in 10.86 million hectares of land.
Aibono is a farm-to-retail platform dealing in high-value and perishable hill vegetables. It provides high quality seeds and other planting material in advance to farmers, based on projected retail demand. AiBono procures the produce at the time of harvest, right from farm gate and sells to neighborhood retail stores in the city of Bengaluru.
It is estimated that around 6.7 million people in the world are suffering from chronic wounds. One in four diabetes patients develop ulceration in the foot, and 70% of these wounds do not get healed because of a mismanaged infection. The traditional ways in which an infected wound is diagnosed is through a culture test, doppler test, CT angiography or biopsy. These are costly, and the report generation takes a few days, depending on where the patient is located.
Adiuvo Diagnostics’ flagship product – Illuminate – is a rapid, point-of-care, handheld device that diagnoses wound infections and does pathogen classification in significantly less amount of time than traditional methods. Living bacteria have an autofluorescence property; it emits light in response to appropriate stimuli. Illuminate creates multi-spectral images of an infected wound based on the light emitted by the pathogens and assesses the images using AI and deep learning. It is then able to detect and classify the pathogen in less than 2 minutes! This platform technology has wider application beyond wound management to areas such as skin parameter assessment, cancer diagnostics, and water quality assessment.
