The government on Thursday said it received 1,983 applications for ‘developing video conference solution’ challenge and Vconsol, a product by Kerala-based Techgentsia, has emerged the winner.

Vconsol is a product of Alappuzha-based Techgentsia Software Technologies Private Limited and will get ₹1 crore as the prize money. The government will also provide additional ₹10 lakh towards operations and management for next three years and will be adopted for use by government through a contract.

In addition, the jury also selected the products developed by three applicants as potential products and decided to offer a developmental contract to be supported by ₹25 lakh each for further maturing their product within three months.

They will be further analysed by a technical committee and subsequently Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY) will recommend to onboard all selected four products on government eMarketplace (GeM).

These three products are — Sarv Webs Pvt. Ltd. (Sarv Wave), Jaipur; PeopleLink Unified Communications Pvt Ltd (Insta VC), Hyderabad; and Instrive Softlabs Pvt Ltd (HydraMeet) of Chennai.

“India has been a country for downloads of apps for too long. It is time for India to become a country where apps are also uploaded that have been downloaded. Since video conferencing was an important instrument, especially during this pandemic, we always discussed why not we have a ‘made in India', video conferencing,” Ravi Shankar Prasad, Minister of Communications and IT, said while announcing the winners of the challenge.

The MeitY had announced an Innovation Challenge for Development of a Video Conferencing Solution under the Digital India Initiative on April 12 and it was open for participation from industries, start-ups and individual experts. And, of the total 1,983 applications being received, 12 applicants with innovative VC solutions were shortlisted to develop/ mature the prototype for which support of ₹10 lakh was provided.

Then five shortlisted applicants were further provided financial support of ₹20 lakh (for three) and ₹15 lakh (for two), mentorship, testing and onboarding onto NIC cloud. Jury and Mentors comprising eminent experts from industry, academia and government provided extensive support to the challenge on pro bono basis.

All the aforesaid video conferencing products will also be provided and support of STQC, CERT-In, CDAC and NIC, a government statement added.