AIC-EMPI organized the country’s first international mobility mission festival – at their campus in New Delhi and  inaugurated their Atal Incubation Centre that is supported by NITI Aayog. The event was focused on Mobility Design, Technology and Business for Vehicles of the Future – Connected, Autonomous, Shared and Electric.

The initiative has been structured under EMPI iFutures that is one of the first futurization platforms in India. The Mobility Mission Festival was organized in association with Ricardo as a Knowledge Partner and Nissan as its Mission Partner.

The Atal Incubation Centre – EMPI was inaugurated and blessed by Ramanathan Ramanan, Mission Director, Atal Innovation Mission, NITI Aayog. AIC-EMPI at present is the only AIC that is focused on renewables, smart energy and new mobility.

The event saw registration and participation from nearly 600+ engineering and management students and start-ups from across India and other countries such as Bangladesh, Vietnam, Philippines, Fiji, Afghanistan and Taiwan. The event offered various competitions, masterclasses, workshops and panel discussions.anized in association with Ricardo as a Knowledge Partner and Nissan as its Mission Partner.

Pankaj Saran, President, EMPI Institutions offered his welcome to the many participants of the mobility festival. In his address Saran spelt out the unique thematic concept of this festival and bringing together a large number of students, start-up, MSMEs and eminent experts from the industry gathered to deliberate on real life issues that the industry is facing on a daily basis. The keynote sessions were conducted by two though leaders – Srihari Mulgund, President, Ricardo Asia and Sirish Batchu, VP, Software & Intelligence, Ather Energy. Both speakers shared a broad perspective on changing paradigm of mobility, after which two plenary sessions were conducted. While one of these were on design thinking that was conducted by Manish Vashisht, Design Director – IBM and the other was on Connected Vehicles by Nitin Nair, General Manager, Connected Cars – Africa, Middle-East and India of Nissan Motor Corporation.

These were followed by a panel discussion that saw eminent speakers focussing on Innovations in the Future of Mobility. The speakers for this session included Atul Arya, Head – Energy Division, Panasonic; Gaurav Talwar, Sr Management Consultant, IBM Business Consulting Services; Sriram Padmanabhan, VP-Marketing, Nissan India; Soumya Bhattacharya, AGM – Delhi Integrated Multimodal Transport System (DIMTS) and Prasad Mane, VP Asia, Ricardo. The session was moderated by Deepangshu Dev Sarmah, Editor-in-Chief, Auto Tech Review, a Springer Nature publication.

The Mobility Festival was different track events that were spread over 30 hours such as Hackathon, Designathon, Brandathon, Pitchathon, Makeathon Expo, Quizility and more. Events such as Hackathon posed real world problems, while in events such as Brandathon, Designathon and Pitchathon that saw experts conducting masterclasses and posed challenging questions for teams to solve. The event also hosted an exposition of vehicles from Nissan, Hyundai, Tata, EESL Gowel, Areon Mobility, M2GO, RNA Innovations among others. The event culminated with a live performance by the award winning Eka rock band.