ISLAMABAD: Minister of Information Technology Anusha Rehman Khan has said people with no connectivity will get 3G by the end of 2018 and everyone will be connected.
She graced the award ceremony of National Competition of Final Year Projects organized by National ICT Grassroots Research Initiative (NIGRI), said a press release issued here. The financial assistance under the program enables students of public and private sector universities, undertaking Final Year Projects (FYP), to build prototypes that demonstrate advances in technology and showcase creativity, innovation and hands-on engineering and development skills.
Ever since the inception of NGIRI in 2011, 72 public and private sector participating universities submitted 5,538 FYP proposals out of which 2,067 FYPs received an overall grant of worth PKR 130 million. Under Phase-II of this initiative, a national competition was announced in 2016.
Speaking on the occasion, the minister asked the students and judges, “how the technology has changed in the past 3 year. She congratulated all the participants for working on the projects and said 3G/4G brought the revolution in Pakistan. She said, “I personally believe that coding is the future; we need to train our children on computer skills. We are training 5 years old.
The freelancer initiative is to turn the students to become entrepreneurs’ because no government can provide so many jobs, saying that 1 million freelancers in 2 years is the target. I want to see 50 % of the population of my country to contribute in the economy,” she added Awards ceremony was carried out by the Minister, where a cash prize of Rs. 400,000 was awarded to 1st position holder Zain Qasir and Hamza PNEC NUST for their project: Power Watch Dog Second position was won by Ali Gul from Balochistan University of Information Technology with a cash prize of Rs. 300,000 for his project: Smart Helmet for Coal Mines whereas the 3rd position with cash prize of Rs. 200,000 was won by Owais Ahmed and Hassan Cheema university of Faisalabad and his team for their project: Design and simulation of fire tube boiler using PLC to avoid industrial boiler accidents.
Supervisors of above mentioned winning FYPs received cash prizes of Rs100,000, Rs75,000 and Rs50,000 respectively.
