The UK and India co-hosted two day long technology festival in New Delhi which concluded on Wednesday (12). The India-UK FutureTech Fest (FTF) brought together over 200 firms and 1000 delegates, featuring world-leading Indian and UK tech firms, along with scientists, policy-makers, and entrepreneurs.
The thought-leadership summit looked at the future of technology and the UK and India’s place as global leaders. Satellite events took place in other major Indian cities, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Mumbai, and Chandigarh.
The India-UK CEO Tech Alliance also held their third meeting at the festival. An expanded FinTech Rocketship Award scheme, designed to boost entrepreneurship and access to UK and Indian markets was launched. And the UK-India Tech Hub - which will bring together hi-tech companies from the UK and India through commercial partnership, mentoring, joint venture and R&D collaboration - will be recruited in early 2019.
Arvind Gupta, Chief Technology Officer, Government of India, Elizabeth Denham, UK Information Commissioner, Julian David, CEO of Tech UK, Ron Mobed, CEO of RELX, and other dignitaries from India and UK took part in the event.
Commenting on the event, Sir Dominic Asquith, High Commissioner to India said, “when prime minister Narendra Modi and prime minister Theresa May announced the India-UK Tech Partnership back in April, they put the enabling power of tech at the heart of our bilateral relationship. We’ve seen fantastic progress since then, demonstrating the breadth and depth of our collaboration.
“The UK-India partnership has embraced whole-heartedly the challenges and opportunities tech brings, with an exciting agenda promising to maintain both countries’ position at the forefront of the tech revolution,” he added.
Celebrating eight months since the announcement of the unique India UK technology partnership, key achievements include the announcement of the first two tech cluster partnerships. The Midlands Engine-Maharashtra partnership will explore all areas of future mobility, whilst the Northern Powerhouse-Karnataka partnership will focus on Artificial Intelligence and Data.
The achievements of the partnership also include, the launch of a £1 million programme bringing some of the best UK artificial intelligence (AI) health companies to deploy their solutions in Indian government hospitals and primary health centres – focusing on diagnostic AI that can tackle some of the biggest diseases in India. Five companies have been short-listed for the first phase and were announced at the festival.
In another major achievement, the first meeting of the UK-India future manufacturing steering group, who are building a report on the design of a ‘Future Manufacturing’ centre in India, based on the world-leading advanced manufacturing catapults in the UK.
