The Ministry of Electronics and IT alongside NITI Aayog's Atal Innovation Mission has launched the Digital India AatmaNirbhar Bharat App Innovation Challenge on Friday. The aim of this challenge is to identify the best Indian apps that are already being used by citizens and have the potential to scale and become world-class Apps in their respective categories. The challenge comes at the right time as the country seeks Indian alternatives to many apps made in foreign countries, especially China, that has been under scrutiny over suspicious activities. Furthermore, the initiative is a response to the Prime Ministers call for AatmaNirbhar, especially in technological products. 

"We all know the huge potential of our market and the scale products can achieve if they can satisfy the demands of the market. Nowadays, we are seeing huge interest & enthusiasm among the startup and tech ecosystem to innovate, develop and promote homegrown apps," wrote Prime Minister Narendra Modi in a LinkedIn post. 

"Today, when the entire nation is working towards creating an Aatmanirbhar Bharat, it is a good opportunity to give direction to their efforts, momentum to their hard-work and mentorship to their talent to evolve Apps which can satisfy our market as well as compete with the world," he added.

The challenge offers various cash awards up to 20 lakhs and other incentives such as featuring Apps on Leader Boards. According to MeitY, the challenge seeks to create an ecosystem where Indian entrepreneurs and startups are incentivised to ideate, incubate, build, nurture and sustain Tech solutions that can serve not only citizens within India but also the world. The Track-1 of the challenge includes eight board categories the challenge mentioned includes, office productivity & work from home, social networking, e-learning, entertainment, health & wellness, business including Agritech and Fintech, News and Games.

"There is tremendous scope among these sectors for new Apps which solve specific issues for India and the world," noted the Prime Minister. "Can we think of making traditional Indian games more popular via Apps? Can we develop Apps with targeted and smart access to the right age group for learning, gaming, etc.? Can we develop gaming apps for people in rehabilitation or getting counselling to help them in their journey? There are many such questions and technology alone can give answers in a creative manner," he stated on the post.

The challenge will also focus on some of the subcategories leaning towards artificial intelligence technologies within each category that includes (1) mobile application harnessing the most accurate facial and / or body mapping technology to allow for a true-to-life virtual try out of products like spectacles, clothes, etc., (2) Mobile application for real-time speech-to-speech translation and camera translation of multiple languages, (3) Application to use mobile devices as image scanners with features like on the fly image correction, image editing, text recognition, etc.

The last date for submission is 18th July 2020, and only Indian entrepreneurs and startups will be eligible to submit their entries in various categories.