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

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 healthcare revenue cycle automation platform BUDDI.AI. It was targeted at students, IT professionals, and anyone in the age group of 8 to 80 years interested in coding.

Swapnil Dangarikar, Official Adjudicator, Guinness World Record, presented the certificate during the online event held on April 30, 2021. 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.

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.”

Further, Prof. Anil D Sahasrabudhe said, “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’.”

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. With the pandemic halting in-person classes, students and professionals in these villages arranged a dozen streaming devices to attend a free online workshop based on Artificial Intelligence.

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. The vernacular approach is one of the unique features of GUVI that sets them apart from its competitors.

Addressing the event, Ram Swaminathan, CEO, Buddi.ai, said, “98% of our employees are in India and we are very proud of building one of the world’s topnotch healthcare platform from India... I think that GUVI is working hard towards upskilling and re-skilling Indian workers. We believe AI is the future. We look forward to taking part in many more events like this.”

The startup also announced that the courses on Python and Face recognition will be offered for free for learning until the end of May 2021. The certification for that Python course will be available on paying a minimal fee of Rs. 1770/- as it is issued by IIT Madras.

The event also introduced discounted pricing for the AICTE and NEAT-selected GUVI product on monthly and yearly subscription services. Now, Tech aspirants can avail of a professionally-curated 100+ course catalog for a minimal amount of 399/month or 1499/year. The fee is remarkably lower than their counterparts who charge the same amount of money for a single course! Those interested can enroll at https://www.guvi.in/subscription

The course catalogue ranges from Cloud Computing, Full-Stack Engineering, Web-Development, Data Science & Analyst to Computational thinking, Cybersecurity, and Ethical hacking. GUVI also has its gamified practice platform - CodeKata, Webkata and MicroARC for interactively facilitating assessments. Registered users are eligible to download the globally recognized certifications upon completion, which they can post to their portfolio for a better professional reach.