Gold Nib Fellowship Commission Announces Winners of Gold Nib Collegepreneur Awards 2012

Gold Nib Fellowship Commission (GNFC) recently announced the winners of Gold Nib Collegepreneur Awards 2012. Receiving 210 entries from all regions of the country, Gold Nib Fellowship Commission finally selected the winners after several rigorous rounds of selections process. Talking about the general trend among student entrepreneurs, Pranav Pranav Chatturvedi, Founder, Gold Nib Fellowship Commission and Gold Nib Collegepreneur Awards said, “The engineering students of South India are creating technological products while the commerce students of Mumbai and Delhi are more into creation of enterprises which are service oriented.”

Among the different sectors, social marketing still remains the biggest attraction for young startups. Specifically there were youth outreach marketing firms like Gopal Krishna’s Chill Maadi which is a print magazine and Vahmine Infotech started by Nizamudheen V. However there were applications from IT firms like Kartik Arora’s Bizzare Creations which was a very strong contender. This company has created an IT platform for other entrepreneurs and is also focusing on CRM softwares.

There was also great buzz in the entertainment sector. In fact two of the Collegepreneur winners emerged from this sector. There were design related firms on show as well. Another sector where the students are actively engaged is the education sector. The awards saw three exceptional education sector related entries from Swapnil Vats from Valonia, Ritesh Watts from Shikshaexpert and Karan Adnani from Bienvenue, who made it to the top 14 but just missed the top 5 by a whisker.

There were also college students who have made their hobby and passions into a full-fledged business like Sakshi Kastiya in Mumbai who was passionate for Nail art and has created a full business from the concept. Akshay Jalan from Tagmuse is another collegepreenur who is creating an enterprise of music lovers and Rakesh Biswas of IYSERT is also doing a wonderful job and creating products from recyclable material and selling them at various other colleges.

As per the applications received, it was evident that Colleges which are fostering entrepreneurship amongst their students are Manipal Institute of Technology, BITS PIlani (including their Hyderabad and Goa campus), SRM University, Jai Hind College in Mumbai, Shaheed Sukhdev College of Business Studies (Delhi University). The awards received exceptional entries from these college.

Winners

• Mohan K from SRM University, Founder of KVL Innovations is a brilliant inventor and has various patents to his name
• Shoury Gupta from SRCC, Delhi University has a dramatics production house, Turntable Productions
• Yash Chandiramani from Jai Hind, Mumbai has an event and entertainment firm, White Knight Entertainments which caters to the youth’s need of socializing and partying
• Nitesh Kumar has created a rural outreach firm, SARAL
• Pulkit Bakshi from SS College of Business Studies has started a merchandising firm, Fabrica India and is now roping in not only college students but also corporate houses as clients.

GNFC will also be mentoring the 5 winners and would be willing to fund them for scaling up either through infusion of capital or through helping them generate more revenues in their field of operations. “India’s fate lies in the hands of these young entrepreneurs. Economies develop because of entrepreneurship and there are innumerable examples to illustrate this fact. India would be harboring around 260 million people in the middle class segment by 2015. It is this segment that we see as the most promising for entrepreneurship,” concludes Pranav.

GNFC proposes to undertake 5-6 activities through the year targeting entrepreneurs between the age group of 17 to 26-year-old entrepreneurs. The first two activities were the Collegepreneur Awards and the Gold Nib Fellowship. For the Gold Nib Fellowship, the commission tied up with the Universal Business School, in Mumbai Karjat, which would provide the incubation for the shortlisted Gold Nib Fellows and at the same time would also provide a Masters in Business Administration to the fellows.