Intel has joined hands with the Indian government to work on a pilot project using sensors to collect information for the Clean Ganga initiative. The pilot project is already running in Varanasi, India, and is expected to be completed by the mid of next year.
Intel technology for Clean Ganga initiative
Intel President India Kumud Srinivasan told reporters that the pilot project has just begun, and in the project “we are using sensors to collect data, which will be then fed to a common center to derive useful information.”
The Indian government made an announcement in June saying that to help control the pollution levels in river Ganga, which is considered very sacred by Indians, it will make use of the latest tools including geospatial and crowd-sourcing technologies.
Intel has centers in India in major metropolitan cities like Bengaluru and Pune. The total employee headcount at these centers is 6,900, and the majority of them contribute to the research and development activities undertaken by the chip maker. “India is a very important market for us, from R&D point of view too, as teams here works on every category from servers to PCs to IoT,” Srinivasan said, adding the Indian unit is the third largest for Intel after the U.S. and Israel.
US firms see big opportunity in India
Srinivasan said in addition that Intel is contributing to the Digital India vision by engaging with state government projects. Microsoft is also connected with the Digital India campaign.
The efforts made by the Indiangovernment were praised by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. He expressed his appreciation through a video in which he congratulated Prime Minister Narendra Modi and IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad for initiating the Digital India campaign.
For the campaign, Microsoft will be using its marquee cloud services such as Microsoft Azure, Dynamics and Office 365 to connect every Indian with global audiences through their global hyper-scale cloud. The U.S. firm believes its cloud and mobility will help citizens to learn and acquire new skills. India’s passion and desire for technology combined with Microsoft’s expertise will push the country in a new era of technology adoption, according to the tech firm.
