Bhubaneswar: Odisha-based IT consultancy firm CSM Tech, which has an active business footprint in Africa, Dubai, the US, and Canada, has teamed up with IIT Madras to help build the world’s fastest, autonomously driven electric racecar by 2025.
CSM Tech is backing Raftar, a motorsports team run by the students of IIT Madras.
Raftar is a team of 40+ students from different disciplines in IIT Madras with a shared passion for automotive engineering and motorsports.
Every year, the team takes up the challenge of building a swift formula student racecar. It works to become the nation’s most competent and cohesive team of engineers.
Industry partnerships play a pivotal role in the design, development and adoption of electric vehicles (EVs). The synergy between a tech company like CSM and an academic and research institution of IIT Madras’ repute brings in a string of benefits like shared expertise and resources, cost sharing and risk mitigation, accelerated research and development, standardization and interoperability, policy advocacy, ecosystem development and knowledge exchange.
CSM Tech has inked a MoU with IIT Madras to power the ambitious dream of developing a disruptive racecar underpinned by indigenous capabilities.
The MoU was inked between Priyadarshi Nanu Pany, founder & CEO of CSM Tech, Lagna Panda, the company’s chief human resources officer (CHRO), and Manu Santhanam, dean of industry contribution & sponsored research at IIT-Madras and Prof Aravind Kumar Chandiran, associate professor of the department of chemical engineering.
Pany said, “This is the future. I am backing it. What the students and faculty of IIT-M can achieve with indigenously built electronics, embedded technologies, and cross-domain expertise is simply spectacular”.
He said the efforts by Raftar have the potential to be a game-changer in passenger vehicles, heavy vehicles, telemetry, vehicle tracking, and much more. The next big innovation of the automobile industry should originate in India, he added.
Prof. Santhanam underscored the role of industry partners in enabling and empowering the engineering ecosystem at IIT, especially Team Raftar. He accredited the students for the temperament and determination to lead such a complex project, executing it excellently and refusing to give in or give up even when faced with insurmountable challenges.
Started in 2012 as a students’ 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 shone brightly abroad at events like Formula Germany and established itself as a formidable force in the university-level combustion and EV categories.
CSM has started supporting IIT-Madras. Last year, it instituted a scholarship at IIT Delhi for the undergrad program, pledging to continue it for a decade. In synchrony with the vision of its top leadership, CSM Tech will continue to support institutions of national eminence in the field of education and work towards improving access to higher education, Pany said.
PTI