On December 6, 2022, an agreement was signed between IIT-K director, Abhay Karandikar and an alumnus of the institution, Ajay Dubey, and his wife Rooma Dubey to launch the ‘Rooma and Ajay Dubey Healthcare Innovation and Ideation Programme’ (HII programme). This was funded by a contribution of USD 2,50,000 or Rs 2 crore from the couple.
This program seeks to invest in and foster advancements in health tech, and create an environment for student-founded startups in the HealthTech field. The HII program will provide the students with insight into the various issues they are tackling and motivate them to create technological innovations to improve the healthcare system.
At IIT Kanpur, the Startup Incubation and Innovation Centre (SIIC) has been set up to provide students with monetary backing and linkages to further their development and foster a culture of enterprise.
Ajay Dubey is a graduate of the Chemical Engineering Department at IIT Kanpur and has over three decades of industry experience. He has been the Vice President of Infosys, the Head of the Infosys Pune Development Center, Chief Operating Officer of Persistent Systems, and an Angel Investor at Uniken. In addition, he has established scholarships for undergraduate and postgraduate students at IIT Kanpur.
Upon signing the contract, Dubey remarked that the purpose of the HII project was to identify solutions constructed, engineered, and produced in India. Obtaining quality healthcare is already a massive problem. The only solution is for India to create its own resources, designing, engineering, and innovating here to create the necessary equipment and processes that will work in India and on a scale that is required.
At this time, Abhay Karandikar expressed his gratitude to Mr. Ajay Dubey and Mrs. Rooma Dubey for their support of research and development in the health-tech sector of IIT Kanpur. This generous backing will no doubt inspire more youthful innovators to create cost-effective technologies that will benefit India’s health-tech sector. He also noted that there has been an exponential increase in health-tech innovations under the R&D ecosystem of IIT Kanpur and a greater number of incubated startups in the healthcare space.
