Prime Minister Narendra Modi will inaugurate the conference and deliver the keynote address for the 2020 edition of the annual IIT alumni event, to be hosted online on December 4 and 5, 2020. This year’s summit, titled ‘IIT2020: The Future is Now’, is billed as the one of the largest virtual conferences ever in the world. The conference is targeted at over 500,000 global alumni, 100,000 current students and more than 6,000 faculty members from 23 IITs across India.
Drawing inspiration from PM Modi’s recent suggestions in “Mann ki Baat”, where he urged other academic institutions to emulate IITs’ way of engaging with their alumni, the 2020 edition has been made open to non-IITians also for participation.
Global line up
Other keynote and prominent speakers at the summit include Piyush Goyal, Union Minister for Indian Railways; Arvind Krishna, CEO of IBM; Rajesh Subramaniam, President and COO of FedEx; Ajei Gopal, CEO of ANSYS; Arjun Malhotra, Cofounder of HCL; Simon Segars, CEO of ARM Holdings; Jyoti Bansal, Co-founder and CEO of Harness; Desh Deshpande, Chairman of Sparta Group; Dr Vivek Murthy, Co-Chair of Covid-19 President-Elect Biden Transition team; Amitabh Kant, CEO of Niti Aayog; and Ashish Chauhan, CEO of Bombay Stock Exchange.
Conference Chairs Sanjiv Goyal and Witty Bindra said, “In line with the conference theme, we are truly honoured to have Hon’ble Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi address the global IIT alumni and share his vision for the future. Moreover, this edition features an outstanding line up of global movers and shakers as speakers, and we hope that ideas shared by them will further inspire and motivate all attendees towards inventing a better future for all of us.”
Global tie ups
Keeping in mind the global audience for IIT2020, this year’s event will run without a pause for 36 hours continually. IIT alumni from more than 100 countries have registered to participate in IIT2020 conference. Over 40 prominent venture capitalists have also registered to attend and further signalled their intention to collectively invest over $500 billion in start-ups co-founded by IIT alumni.
“The presence of leading venture capitalists at this event would no doubt inspire the next generation of IIT graduates to launch innovative ventures in large numbers,” Goyal and Bindra added.
IIT2020 is organised by PanIIT USA, a global alumni association featuring alumni from all 23 IITs. Ron Gupta is the Programme Chair, while Sundy Srinivasan is Chairman of PanIIT USA.