Six women-led startups have won the COVID-19 Shri Shakti Challenge organised by MyGov in collaboration with UN Women.
The top winners are - P. Gayatri Hela, the founder of Bengaluru-based Resada Lifesciences Private Limited that designs and develops home and agricultural-based products using plant extracts instead of synthetic chemicals, Romita Ghosh, a cancer survivor and founder of Shimla-based iHeal HealthTech Private Limited which is a healthcare startup that has been at the forefront of the fight against COVID and has been providing PPE kits to hospitals.
While Dr Anjana Ramkumar and Dr Anushka Ashokan are the product manager and co-founder of Kerala-based Thanmatra Innovations Private Limited have come up with the innovative solution of an anti-microbial solution that could be sprayed into handkerchiefs or dupattas for making them safe to be used as face masks.
The objective is to encourage and involve women-led startups to come up with innovative solutions that can help in the fight against COVID-19 or solve problems that impact a large number of women. MyGov in collaboration with UN Women, launched the COVID-19 Shri Shakti Challenge in April 2020.
The challenge was hosted on the Innovate platform of MyGov that called for applications from women-led startups as well as startups who have solutions that address issues faced by a larger number of women.
The challenge was implemented in two stages - Ideation stage and Proof of Concept (PoC) stage and received an response with a total of 1,265 entries, from across the nation.
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After thorough screening, 25 startups were shortlisted for presentations to the jury which included Debjani Ghosh, President NASSCOM, Rohini Srivathsa, National Technology Officer (CTO) Microsoft India, Dr R Ramanan, MD Atal Innovation Mission, Nishtha Satyam, Dy Country representative, UN Women India and Abhishek Singh, CEO MyGov.
All 25 selected startups presented their solutions to the jury which evaluated the solutions proposed by the startups on the parameters that included innovation, usability, relevance and impact of their idea on society and after thorough review 11 finalists were chosen for the next stage. All the 11 selected startups were provided prize money of Rs 75,000 each to further develop their ideas.
Mentorship sessions were organised to enable graduation of the ideas into proof of concepts that can be scaled up. These sessions were topics that included Business Modelling, Financial Modelling, Legal Certifications, Digital Marketing, Product Design, Art of making pitch and were conducted with the support of NASSCOM, industry experts, and the Atal Incubation Centre at the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology.
After giving time to the 11 startups to develop the solutions, the final presentations were again made to the jury on October 27. The quality of the solutions presented was excellent and the jury had a tough time evaluating them.
After intense discussions and deliberations, the jury selected the top 3 entries as winners, and decided to recognize 3 additional entries as 'Promising Solutions'.
In addition to the earlier announced reward of Rs 5 lakh for the top 3 winners, UN Women agreed to reward Rs 2 lakh each to the 3 startups chosen for their promising solutions.
Sources: IANS