Don Bosco College of Engineering students’ project wins national competition for Robotic Library Management System

(MissionNewswire) Students from the Don Bosco College of Engineering’s electronics and telecommunications department, located in Fatorda, in Goa, India, won the national competition “Robotic Library Management System.” The students beat out more than 1,000 other projects and created a way to automate the conventional library system with the help of a robotic system.

Kingsley Fernandes, Renvick Fernandes and Jhurran Francis worked together to create the project under the guidance of teachers Yeshudas Muttu and Flavia Leitao, in collaboration with the Don Bosco College of Engineering and its Forum for Innovation Incubation Research & Entrepreneurship (FiiRE). This department has helped 75 startups over the last two years.

“FiiRE works in accordance with the guidelines of the Startup India policy, which aims to build a strong ecosystem that is conducive for startup business growth, to drive sustainable economic growth and generate large-scale employment opportunities,” said DS Prashant, CEO of FiiRE. “This is achieved with an additional focus on innovation, product design and the core team that is driving the idea toward implementation.”

Among the ongoing support provided by FiiRE, co-working spaces are available for new businesses, including facilities such as meeting rooms, conference rooms, open work areas and an auditorium.

“FiiRE offers a structured incubation process based on the 12 critical success elements for start-ups,” added Prashant. “Pre-incubation counseling and idea validation is done before accepting the idea into the incubation program. Incubation involves training and mentoring sessions. This helps startups build the prototype and connect to early adopters and investors over a period of 12 months.”

Access to professional training and workforce development services is highly valued by youth in India. The country, which is home to 1.34 billion people (18 percent of the world’s population), will have overtaken China as the world’s most populous country by 2024, according to the World Economic Forum. While India has the world’s largest youth population, it has yet to capitalize on this, leaving some 30 percent of this population without employment, education or training.

India has the world’s fourth largest economy but more than 22 percent of the country lives in poverty. About 31 percent of the world’s multidimensionally poor children live in India, according to a report by the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative.

India’s youth face a lack of educational opportunities due to issues of caste, class and gender. Almost 44 percent of the workforce is illiterate and less than 10 percent of the working-age population has completed a secondary education. In addition, many secondary school graduates do not have the knowledge and skills to compete in today’s changing job market.

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