Students encouraged to leverage government schemes for entrepreneurship at CII event in Coimbatore

Meet in coimbatore urges students to use government schemes

Students were encouraged to leverage government schemes for entrepreneurship and deploy cutting-edge technologies that would address the problems of the city at a CII panel discussion hosted by Kumaraguru Institutions here on Thursday.

The Y 20 brainstorming session involving participation of top officials and successful entrepreneurs, an annual exercise to provide guidance to prospective entrepreneurs among students, was organised by Young Indians (Yi) Coimbatore chapter, on the sidelines of the G 20 summit.

The sessions were held on the theme: "Future of Government – Reimagining Governance and Future of Entrepreneurship.

Observing that Coimbatore was a city of entrepreneurs and innovators, Collector Kranthi Kumar Pati exhorted students to use the State government’s New Entrepreneur cum Enterprise Development Scheme (NEEDS) by pitching innovative ideas. The scheme entails funding up to ₹5 crore with 25% subsidy, he said.

Coimbatore was developing into an IT hub, and the Coimbatore Tech City project announced recently by the government would generate opportunities for the students, the Collector said.

Speaking on how technology had disrupted operations in various government departments, City Police Commissioner V. Balakrishnan said that artificial intelligence and drone technology offered plenty of opportunities. While challenges to security had gone up due to technology, it had been doing good too, he said adding that his office had started using Chat GPT for office works such as drafting of letters. AI-enabled CCTV cameras send out alerts about unusual activities, he said.

Negative influence of social media on children was very high, and cyber crimes had shot up significantly, but technology being inevitable, the administrators need to be equipped to tackle the challenges, Mr. Balakrishnan said.