The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) held a Round Table Discussion on “IETF Capacity Building in India” on 7 February, 2017. The meeting was well attended by members of different stakeholder communities.
The meeting was chaired by Mr. Rajiv Bansal, Joint Secretary, MeitY, who shared that building capacity in the country by sensitizing the community members on issues pertaining to IETF, thereby encouraging more participation in the International Standard making process, especially the IETF from India was the main aim of this meeting. He further added that the Government is working on various initiatives to improve the present dismal participation of Indians and business houses at IETF and the views of stakeholder are being assimilated to draft an India approach paper.
During the round table, people who had participated in the IETF, including past IETF Fellows shared an overview of IETF and its works, the current topics which may be of interest to India, current capacity building initiatives to promote participation in India such as the IETF India Community initiative, the IICB Project and initiatives undertaken by CDAC to encourage participation of Indians in standard making. Further real life experience in getting an RFC was shared with the audience by Abhijaan Bhattacharya from TCS.
Being an interactive session, participants also discussed on ways to encourage more participation, especially of technical communities, students and Indian business and build an IETF Technical Community in India. At the meeting CCAOI Director, Amrita Choudhury suggested that along with creating awareness, mentoring and creating a repository of information for people who are interested to contribute would be helpful.
The presentations from the IETF Roundtable were made on -
Harish Chowdhary on "Introduction to IETF and Standards process"
Vinayak Hegde on "Introduction to IIESoc and proposed activities"
Anupam Agarwal on "IICB - Indian Internet Capacity Building Programme"
BS Bindhumadhava on "IIREF - Indian Internet Research and Engineering Forum"
Abhijan Bhattacharyya on "TCS at IETF and journey of an RFC