The first ever International Cloud Computing Challenge is being held by the Worldskills India and hosted by NASSCOM in New Delhi from July 1-6 with 10 participating countries. The winners will participate in the 45th WorldSkills Competition being held in Kazan (Russia) from August 22-27, 2019 that will see 1,400 Competitors from 67 countries competing in 56 skills. Cloud computing has been added to the skills ‘Olympics’ for the first time.
The challenge was formally inaugurated by Dr Mahendra Nath Pandey, union skills minister on July 2 in the opening ceremony where participants were given a traditional welcome and NASSCOM officials briefed about the challenge. Japan, China, Brazil, South Korea, Russia, Singapore, Belgium, Ireland and hosts India are participating in this regional qualifier. Saumyajit Dutta, a computer science student from Lovely Professional University, Jalandhar is representing India. Amazon India has announced internship for Saumyajit. The participants, skilled challengers will test their mettle against fellow international candidates and exchange ideas and technical knowhow. The skill of cloud computing for WorldSkills Competition is being led by sector skill council of IT-ITeS and NSDC together with AWS India and Ctrls.
According to Rajesh Agarwal, joint secretary, MSDE, the government is committed fostering skills as aspiration for the youth of country and by next year skill competitions will be expanded to include participants from every state. He said India is playing an important internationally in providing platform to skills competitions and thereby making learning from each other a possibility along with standardization.
In his special address, Chairman NASSCOM Keshav Murugesh said that in coming 3 to 4 years, 2 million people would be trained in digital technology from the current 0.6 million people with digital economy posed to register huge impetus. He also asked for enactment of data protection bill at the earliest and increasing spending on cloud.
Skills minister Mahendra Nath Pandey said that in coming months about 2.5 lakh new jobs will be created in the IT sector through the comprehensive skill Development programme. Referring to rapid advances made in the digital technology in India, he said that take this sector has increased to the tune of 7.2 billion dollars from 2.5 billion in 2018.
