While celebrating National Engineers’ Day, experts emphasise the need for collaboration, risk-taking, and ethical frameworks to build a sustainable and responsible DeepTech ecosystem for India’s future. From a decade when “everyone wanted to be an engineer” to what is now being hailed as India’s Techade, the journey of engineering as a profession has seen a remarkable transformation. Today, it’s just as likely to mean algorithms, data models, or neural networks. Prof Sandeep K. Shukla says: “The problem in India that the DeepTech startups are facing today is not so much on the funding side, but on the side of acceptance of their products by the government entities, PSUs, and larger corporations in general. While there are enough programs and schemes from the government to incubate, there are no concomitant changes in the policy or incentivization in accepting DeepTech products in place of well-established products.”

AIC-IIITH has launched the 3rd Akash EPAM Social Impact Innovation Program (ESIIP) to support GreenTech startups in areas like Green Energy, Smart Cities, Climate Tech, Sustainable Agriculture, and Mobility. The program also leverages IIITH’s strong research ecosystem to drive cutting-edge innovation in areas like AI/ML, Robotics, GIS etc to advance India’s UN SDG commitments with a focus on Climate Action (SDG 13). The program recognizes the importance of research-led tech and entrepreneurial innovation towards sustainable climate action. Startup-led innovation is a critical driver of climate action, especially in developing countries like India. Yet an analysis by Cambridge Associates shows that Emerging Market Greentech startups attract only 9% of total investment in the sector. As per AIC-IIITH’s research, a mere ~0.2% of total CSR spending has been spent on Innovation.

SubtasksWhere, IIIT Hyderabad’s winning team of competitive programmers climbed to 73rd world ranking in the ACM –ICPC World Finals, gaining a place on the Honors list , for solving 6 or more programming problems. It was a sweet sense of accomplishment for the IIIT Hyderabad coding team comprising of Shiven Sinha, Hari Aakash K and Sushil Raaja Umasudhan, at the recently concluded 2025 ICPC World Finals. Hosted by ADA University at Baku in Azerbaijan, the algorithmic programming competition challenges university students to grapple complex real-world problems within a tight timeframe. The global contest featuring 73,083 students from 103 countries, tested the creativity, teamwork and problem solving skills of 140 shortlisted teams from 3,424 universities. Held between August 31 and September 5, the ICPC venues included three iconic architectural wonders including the futuristically designed Heydar Aliyev Center by Ar. Zaha Hadid, the Baku Convention Center and the Baku Expo Center.