India's Niti Aayog partners with AWS for setting up Cloud innovation centre (CIC)

Amazon Web Services has now announced a partnership with the Government of India think tank The National Institution for Transforming India (NITI) Aayog. 

The partnership intends to set up its Frontier Technologies Cloud Innovation Center (CIC) in India to address societal challenges via digital innovation.

The Frontier Technologies CIC aims to expand innovation in skill development, agriculture, and healthcare. It will identify and collaborate with local lenders, which include the experts at the state and district levels, to solve critical social challenges.

Manav Sehgal, India lead for AWS CICs at AWS, said, "The NITI Aayog Frontier Technologies CIC will enable pace of innovation with rapid prototyping of applications, while lowering cost of experimentation with technology, and scaling quickly to deliver outcomes good for the public sector in India."

Ben Butler, Global lead for AWS CICs at AWS said, "We invite public sector organizations in India to submit real-world challenges to the NITI Aayog Frontier Technologies CIC. We will combine public sector knowledge of the community and use AWS technologies to address selected challenges. We will also share the prototypes and documentation that we create as open-source with other communities facing similar challenges."

The Cloud Innovation Centers (CIC) program is a public-private partnership. Local enterprises, universities, startups, and researchers can experiment and build prototypes on AWS Cloud.

As per the AWS CIC’s website, it helps the non-profits, government agencies, and educational institutions to collaborate on challenges, apply design thinking methodology, access technology expertise, and test new ideas from AWS.

While on the other hand, the cloud computing vertical of Amazon has set up around 12 CICs across the globe; the one in India is the first to address social challenges at a national level. It joins a global network of AWS public sector CICs across South Korea, Germany, Canada, Bahrain, Australia, and the US.