Chennai: Fastest Growing Tech Giant-CSM Tech has just joined the quest of IIT Madras in building the world’s fastest autonomously driven electric racecar by 2025.
The GovTech Pioneer is backing IIT Madras’ student-run motorsports team Raftar as they get ready to shake up the world of automotive engineering with the power of indigenously built technologies.
Started in 2008 as a student’s club for building a blazing fast combustion-driven sports car, the team has won the Formula Bharat thrice, the topmost motorsports event in the country for educational institutions, more than any other peer. It has also shown bright abroad at events like Formula Germany and established itself as a formidable force in both combustion and EV categories at an university-level.
The MoU was inked between CEO Priyadarshi Nanu Pany, CHRO Lagna Panda and Prof. Manu Santhanam, Dean of Industry Contribution & Sponsored Research at IIT-Madras. Also present at the event were Assistant Professor Arvind Kumar Chandiran from the Chemical Engineering Department along with several members of Team Raftar.
While addressing the students, CEO Shri Pany noted, “This is the future. And am backing it. What the students and faculty of IIT-M are able to achieve with indigenously built electronics, embedded technologies and cross-domain expertise is simply spectacular”. He advised members of Team Raftar to stay aligned with envisioned goals, and that the IIT and CSM would ensure the rest.
Prof. Santhanam echoed the sentiment and underscored the role played by industry partners in enabling and empowering the engineering ecosystem in IIT and especially, Team Raftar. He accredited students for the temperament and determination to lead such complex project, executing it with excellence and refusing to given in or give up even when faced with insurmountable challenges.
CSM CEO Shri Pani also assed that the efforts by Raftar have the potential to be a gamechanger in the passenger vehicle as well as heavy vehicles, telemetry, vehicle tracking and lot more. He hailed the team as a force to reckon with and called upon to them to keep working towards taking the nation forward and upward, and that the next big innovation of automobile industry should originate in India.
CSM has started supporting IIT-Madras under its CSR initiative and non-profit CSM Foundation. Last year, it instituted a scholarship at IIT Delhi in the graduate program with a pledge to endow it for a decade. As envisioned by the leadership at CSM, the company will continue to support institutions of national eminence in the field of education and work towards improving access to higher education.