The National Quantum Science and Technology Symposium,( www.nqsts.com) held from July 26th to August 3rd , brought together the various Ecosystems stakeholders for Quantum in India together on a Common Platform. The idea was to provide an exposure to all entities associated with Quantum and provide a Birds Eye view of the capabilities in Quantum across India.
We were fortunate to have great representation from the Government, Academia and Industry including Start-ups in this space. The Symposium was organized by QETCI, IIIT Hyderabad and IEEE Quantum Initiative in Association with the Principal Scientific Advisor’s Office, Government of India.
Dr Vijay Raghavan, PSA to Govt of India talked about the National Quantum Mission and the stage of the mission in the Approval Process with the Government, indicating that we will have more insights very soon. Dr Murali Mohan from DST shared details of the QUEST program and some of the efforts happening across India in Quantum. Dr Sivan shared the plans from ISRO for Quantum enabling the Satellites. Mr Sawhney shared the partnerships that Meity is getting into with Industry for Quantum.
Overall, this was possibly the first time when in an open forum people attending the symposium got a holistic view of various Strategic Initiatives in Quantum.
The Industry Players like TCS, Microsoft, Amazon, IBM all share more details of their work in Quantum and Companies like TCS , Amazon talked about how they were hiring for Quantum in India. QnuLabs, a startup that originated in India also talked about how its team was expanding and the kind and variety of customers that they were working with. For all the sceptics’ of Quantum, this was an eye opening moment about an existing market in Quantum, Not just a future market. There was a fair amount of discussion around industry use cases that are being worked upon right now using quantum or quantum related technologies.
QETCI was officially launched and Reena Dayal, Chair shared a worldview of Quantum , along with the plans for QETCI. The Symposium was attended by people from Academia, Industry and Students and there were a few International participants as well The event was well covered by various media as you can see at Press and News – Quantum Ecosystems and Technology Council of India (qetci.org).
