1.12 Lakh People Join ‘AI For India’ Event, Set Guiness Record

As many as 1,12,314 people participated in the ‘AI-for-India’ Initiative organized on 24th-25th April 2021 by IIT Madras-incubated startup GUVI and All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) to upskill Indians in Python programming language. They set a world Guinness record for ‘Most numbers of users to take a programming lesson in 24 Hours,’ beating the previous record by 50 times.  

In addition, as many as 1.43 lakh users took part in the online training session to build a Face Recognition App during the same event. The program was conducted by GUVI in association with AICTE, IIT Madras Research Park and BUDDI.AI, a clinical and revenue cycle automation platform. It was targeted towards students, IT professionals, and anyone in the age group of eight to 80 years interested in coding. 

Mr. Swapnil Dangarikar, Official Adjudicator, Guinness World Records, presented the certificate during the online event held on April30. The ‘AI-For-India’ had participants from a cross-section of the society such as school kids, high school students, college graduates, job seekers, and experienced IT and Non-IT professionals, among others. 

The vision imparted by Ms. Sridevi, Co-founder and Ex-COO of GUVI to impart knowledge and skill of AI to every nook and corner of India was GUVI’s guiding light to reach this milestone.  

Addressing the online event, Prof. Rajive Kumar, Member Secretary, All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), said, “Non-engineering students, those pursuing graduation and even school students have taken part in the event. This is the second world record that AICTE has been involved in the past one year. AICTE will continue to work with startups like GUVI.”  

Congratulating the GUVI Team for achieving this milestone, Prof. Anil D Sahasrabudhe, Chairman, AICTE, said, “This was a very good goal - learning Artificial Intelligence and learning Python. You (GUVI) should provide another opportunity for people to learn through such events. This ‘AI for India’ should go from 1.0 to ‘AI for India 2.0’ and go on to set larger records. I also tried to learn during this event and it was much simpler than the earlier (programming) languages I had learned. We always think face recognition is difficult but this event showed it was not rocket science.   

“In India, we have 300 million students, almost the entire population of the U.S. and already, CBSE has introduced AI in the school curriculum. We have the Atal Innovation Mission under which 10,000 schools have got Tinkering Labs. There is already an ecosystem for innovation, entrepreneurship and learning and the rise of this has to come through accelerators. Importantly, AI has huge applications. Lot of applications for AI in Agriculture and the automotive industry, from parking vehicles to manufacturing. A lot of potential also exists in areas like ‘Decision Making.’ Data analysis can play a huge role in ‘Decision Making’,” he added.  

Students and working professionals from all parts of the country, from the urban centres to those in remote villages, worked on their mobile phones and laptops to take programming lessons in Python during this landmark event.  

Speaking earlier, Prof. M.P. Poonia, Vice Chairman, AICTE, said, “The success rate of GUVI is very high. The participants have learned and immediately shown the outcome. The participants are now confident enough to showcase their learning and this type of learning is needed in the Indian Education System. This type of real outcome-based learning is needed. There were participants even from the remotest village in Rajasthan, near the Pakistan border.” 

The host of the workshop guided the participants on how to build a facial recognition app from scratch. Unlike regular IT workshops, the medium of instruction was in three vernacular languages besides English - Tamil, Telugu and Hindi.