Microsoft India Releases 2017 India Citizenship Report
Microsoft India released the 2017 India Citizenship Report last week. The report captures an overview of the company’s citizenship programs and impact in the one-year period between April 2016 and March 2017.
In 2016-17, Microsoft extended support to over 4,000 Indian start-ups, supported skill trainings for 30,000 youth, helped train 26,000 teachers, working closely with many government departments, industry bodies and not-for-profit organizations in the country.
Madhu Khatri, associate general counsel, Microsoft India, said: “We are committed to digitally empowering Indian youth and communities. Our various not-for-profit programs help young people attain new skills, find jobs and start new businesses. We are committed to making our technology and our resources work for India’s inclusive growth.
“We support many projects that empower youth and the communities in India and are particularly proud of the work our employees do. During the last year, our employees have supported over 100 not-for-profit organizations in the country and donated in excess of INR 29 million for community development projects.”
The report presents the following highlights:
Empowering entrepreneurs
During the year, Microsoft supported over 4000 entrepreneurs to build their business, scale up, and grow. The three major programs under this initiative are:
BizSpark, a Microsoft flagship initiative, is a one-year program aimed at supporting early stage start-ups. BizSpark Plus program allows these start-ups with a working prototype to accelerate innovation and get their products and services to customers as quickly as possible.
Microsoft Accelerator is a global program built to empower start-ups in their journey to build great companies. The program entails working with market-ready start-ups to provide tools, resources, connections, knowledge, and expertise.
Microsoft’s Partner Accelerator helped GenNext Hub (has successfully graduated four cohorts with more than 52 start-ups), AIM Smart City and Brigade Group (has successfully enabled five start-ups).
Cloud training programs such as Azure Vidyapeeth and GuruVarta provide assistance to upskill partners and enable them to help over 10,000 SMBs across 250 cities across India to move to the cloud.
Transforming education
Microsoft’s various education and skill development programs helped train 30,000 youth and 26,000 teachers during the year.
* In 2016-17, under Project Shiksha, over 8,124 teachers were trained, especially in Tamil Nadu, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh, positively impacting 361,000 students.
* Project Saksham has equipped institutes of higher education to digitize, build technology-enabled content repositories and schedule online sessions. Over the years, Microsoft has conducted trainings for over 3,307 educators across 123 universities. In 2016-17, 661 teachers across 21 universities were trained.
* As part of the Microsoft Educator Community program, in June 2016, the Government of Maharashtra adopted the QR Coded textbook idea catalyzed by a Microsoft India Educator – Rajintsinh Disale, which allows teachers to receive additional resources and information related to a textbook by simply scanning a QR code.
* Other initiatives such as the Microsoft Academia Accelerator and the Microsoft India Research Indian Summer School (175 students have received internships in 2017 through RX Labs) have received positive response from students and faculty alike, in the past year.
Innovation for societal welfare
Microsoft India is bringing the machine learning and artificial intelligence to solve healthcare, agriculture and education challenges.
* In December 2016, in partnership with five global eyecare partners, Microsoft India announced the Microsoft Intelligent Network for Eyecare (MINE) - a mission-driven global consortium of like-minded commercial, research, and academic institutions that collectively work on diverse datasets, including the rate of change of myopia in children, conditions that impact children’s eyesight, predictive outcomes of refractive surgery, optimal surgery parameters, as well as ways to personalize a surgery.
* The ‘Digital Village’ project in Harisal - a partnership with the government of Maharashtra and other industry partners created a technology-enabled village with a provision for Internet and digital literacy.
