Gagan Goyal, a mechanical engineering graduate of IIT- Bombay, is the founder-director of the Mumbai-based ThinkLabs Techno-solutions Pvt. Ltd (estb. 2006), a company committed to promoting hands-on science and technology and robotics education,
Newspeg. This summer ThinkLabs is conducting six-day robotics workshops for children aged nine-18 in Mumbai, Pune, Bangalore, Chennai, Delhi and Hyderabad. The course content for the camp has been designed by the R&D centre of ThinkLabs sited within the Society of Innovation & Entrepren-eurship (SINE) of IIT-Bombay.
Direct Speech. “Indian students are introduced to robotics only when they enter an engineering college, unlike in the US and China, where almost every school has a robotics lab. Through our workshops, training programmes and other educational services including setting up robotics labs in schools, we intend to bridge the manufacturing and shopfloor productivity gap between Indian and OECD countries by familiarising students with robotics in their early years,” says Goyal.
History. In 2005, Goyal quit the public sector Hindustan Petroleum Corporation and with his savings of Rs.2 lakh and support from the SINE — IIT-B’s incubation cell for research and development — promoted ThinkLabs beginning with conducting short-duration workshops for engineering students. In 2008, this promising venture received funding of $1 million from Seedfund, a private equity venture company. Since then, ThinkLabs has trained and certified 37,000 engineering students in robotics, and through Robo.in conducted robotics workshops for 10,000 school students across the country. In addition, since June 2010, it has set up robotics labs in 20 schools in Mumbai.
Future plans. “Our next diversification is to offer full-time degree programmes in various branches of robotics. Last year, we launched short-term courses at the Punjab-based Lovely Professional University and a postgraduate diploma course in robotics and embedded systems jointly with the UK-based Salford University. In the next two years, our aim is to collaborate with 50 engineering colleges and set up robotics labs in 250 schools across India,” says Goyal.
Swati Roy (Mumbai)