By
Abhishek Singh

CEO MyGov & NeGD


AatmaNirbhar Bharat App Innovation Challenge is momentous an opportunity for Indian tech developers, entrepreneurs and companies to build for India at a scale, that is unparalleled anywhere in the world and ensure that robust, scalable, secure and useful apps are developed for various needs of people, not only in India but for the entire world.

Globally, Indians are amongst the top users for apps in the world. India accounted for more than 5 billion downloads out of the 33.6 billion app downloads in Q1 of 2020. App downloads have been up 20.3% over last year. However, Indian companies figure nowhere in the top countries developing Apps. The top 20 companies include 5 from US, 5 from China and the remaining 10 are from France, Belarus, Israel, Germany, UK, Switzerland, Turkey, Ireland, Vietnam and Cyprus. Facebook, Google and Bytedance (Tiktok) are the top 3 companies with a total market cap of almost 2 trillion $s and growing very fast.

As per the data on Sensor Tower, top 5 app categories being downloaded on Playstore are games, utility tools like file transfer, entertainment, social and communications. On App Store, the top 5 categories include Games, Photo & Video, Entertainment, Utilities and Social Networking Game downloads are almost 5 times more than the next highest category on both Playstore and Appstore.

Based on this, the 8 categories for the AatmaNirbhar Bharat App Innovation Challenge have been identified which include Office & Work from Home tools, Social Networking, E Learning, Entertainment, Health & Wellness, Business including Agritech & Fintech, News and Games.

The developed have the opportunity to innovate and design Apps as the categories give ample flexibility. For more complex Apps, that may require longer time frame for development, another Challenge round will follow. This initiative is expected to kickstart an App ecosystem with incentives for developers to dream and build innovative Tech solutions that can be scaled up for the world.

The capability of our startups to build innovative solutions is also proved with the enthusiastic response received for the Video Conferencing Innovation Challenge launched last month which saw more than 2000 applications, out of which 12 were shortlisted to make protoyypes and after evaluation top 5 have been identified to build full scale solutions.

The fact that these companies are from Jaipur, Hyderabad, Alappuzha and Chennai shows the extent of talent pool that exists in our tech startups. The fact that India has built tech platforms like Aadhaar, UPI, Digilocker, GeM, Aarogya Setu and many more proves that we can build robust applications at a scale that is unparalleled.

This App Innovation Challenge will further give an opportunity to startups and entrepreneurs from all across India to contribute to building these Apps and get awarded as also feature on Leader boards. This AatmaNirbhar Bharat App Innovation Challenge is truly a bold leap towards building a Digital Aatmanirbhar Bharat and creating unicorns.

To participate, one can log in to https://innovate.mygov.in/app-challenge/

(Views expressed are personal)