Nadella unveils tech to boost Skill India Mission

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella unveiled a suite of products tailored for the Indian market including Skype Lite and Project Sangam, aimed to boost the government’s Skill India Mission.

The company also announced that it has signed up State Bank of India (SBI) for its cloud services. Microsoft had recently signed up Flipkart, Tata Motors, and government departments across the states of Andhra Pradesh, Punjab, Maharashtra, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu for using its cloud and mobile technologies to empower employees, engage customers, optimise processes, and transform products and services.

Project Sangam aims to bridge the widening skill gap in the country. It will enable blended online and offline, teaching and learning.

The project aims to connect skills learning programmes directly with relevant jobs, by leveraging the power of LinkedIn’s job search platform. Project Sangam will allow users to register using their Aadhaar identity ensuring lifelong access to the platform. Project Sangam can strengthen the skilling ecosystem in India, and has the potential to benefit millions of new skill seekers in the country.

“Project Sangam is the first project for the coming together of LinkedIn and Microsoft so that we can tackle the enormous challenge of how to provide every person in India the opportunity to skill themselves for the jobs that are going to be available. This is something that we are going to scale in the coming year,” Nadella said.

Skype Lite is Microsoft’s fastest and smallest Skype app to date. It is built to help people in India stay connected in challenging network conditions. Skype Lite contains features specifically designed for India, including help to manage SMS by intelligently removing clutter, mobile data and Wi-Fi usage monitoring, India-focused Skype Bots and power-saving functionality.

The app will be available in seven local languages including Gujarati, Bengali, Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu. Skype will also bring Aadhaar integration to the app by June 2017. With this integration, Skype users will be able to authenticate the identity of unknown callers in a variety of situations where identification verification is required, including job interviews, goods and property sale.