The pandemic season saw some of the best innovations in this decade and BharatVC is no exception. In 2020, the Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology, India came up with a pan India challenge to find & recognize a 100% made in India video conferencing solution that will ultimately replace all the other popular “foreign” VC solutions. The challenge was named “Innovation Challenge for Development of Video Conferencing Solution” and Techgentsia saw this as an opportunity to present its own product into the challenge. The challenge saw around 2000 companies competing with their products and Techgentsia won the challenge and received 1 Crore prize money from MeitY.
The Challenge
To develop a scalable, robust VC solution that follows the most modern security & privacy policies put forward by the Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology, India. The solution should be customizable, on-premise deployable and fit for the Indian environment.
Uniqueness of BharatVC
Across the country, in public sector companies and in governmental organizations, hardware MCUs and H323/SIP endpoints have been in use since 2000. BharatVC seamlessly integrates these legacy video conferencing equipment without any external bridge, a capability most of the other popular VC platforms lack.
Deployment
National Informatics Centre (NIC), an organization under MeiTY, was assigned by the Govt. of India to set up BharatVC after the challenge result was announced. The Video Conferencing Division of NIC, who has been conducting VIP meetings using legacy video conferencing devices since 2000, deployed BharatVC on NIC’s Meghraj cloud.
Usage
Our team of engineers along with NIC’s experienced video conferencing experts deployed and successfully conducted hundreds of meetings since November 2020. During the 2nd Covid wave, BharatVC was extensively used by MeitY for conducting executive & senior level meetings across India.
The Aftermath
Initially, NIC deployed 30 MCU nodes , which had a capacity of 1500 HD ports and after completing the successful first phase, they are planning to form a commercial version of BharatVC through NICSI, the business division of NIC. Along with this, NIC also has plans to scale up their services to the government of India. As of now, a large deployment is being planned by NIC in Hyderabad Data Center.
NIC also started developing other applications using the VCONSOL® engine. Currently an instant messaging application with multi-party video capability called “Sandes” is being developed for the government. The integration of the engine is already done and is awaiting user testing as of now.
NIC is also planning to use the VCONSOL® engine for their future applications which requires a multi party video conferencing engine.