Nine student teams from across India faced off in the National Finals of the National Student Case Competition 2026, hosted by the Center for Digital Public Goods (CDPG), IIM Bangalore, with the support of Perfios and Anumati Account Aggregator, on 30^th September 2026. Bringing together students from engineering, technology, management, public policy and finance domains, the finals put the spotlight on how India’s Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) can be designed, governed and built to create meaningful public value.

The Center for Digital Public Goods (CDPG) at IIM Bangalore released the second edition of the ‘State of DPI in India 2026’ report at the Annual Policy Conclave, organized by CDPG in partnership with eGov Foundation, on 30^th September. The report was unveiled by Mr. V Easwaran, ED & COO, Protean eGov Technologies Ltd, Mr. Viraj Tyagi, CEO, eGov Foundation, and Dr. R Srinivasan, Chairperson, CDPG and faculty of the Strategy area at IIMB.

To read the full report, please click here.

The Venture Showcase, held as part of Goldman Sachs 10,000 Women, brought together 33 women entrepreneurs representing ventures spanning domains including Waste Management, Feed industry, Healthcare and Wellness, Semiconductors, Luxury Retail & eCommerce, Food & Beverages, Handicrafts, FinTech, Interior Design, and more.

Initiatives like this help enable strong strategic and operational capabilities among the cohorts, driving them further ahead on their journey as business leaders.

As part of the Circular Innovation Incubation Program, an initiative by Pernod Ricard India Foundation in partnership with NSRCEL, founders and the wider start-up and MSME ecosystem in Jaipur were brought together for a dialogue.

The conversation explored what it takes to build and scale climate and circular economy ventures – from identifying commercial opportunities and achieving market adoption to navigating government support and ecosystem networks.

For founders in Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities, opportunities to access the right networks, mentorship and support could be a key enabler in taking locally built solutions to larger markets. The program creates a platform for founders building in circularity and climate innovation to access equity-free grant opportunities, mentorship, and government, corporate and ecosystem networks.

As part of Velocity – Kotak BizLabs Accelerator Programme, a CSR initiative by Kotak Mahindra Bank, NSRCEL hosted a workshop for hardware founders, in Coimbatore. The workshop aimed at addressing what it really takes to move from a working prototype to a market-ready product.

Through this conversation, hardware founders explored insights on the journey beyond building the technology and learnt why customer validation must come before product development.

The session covered few key lessons, including, the need to start with the problem, not the technology and validate a real customer need before building; to understand the customer and identify the user, buyer, pain point, alternatives, and urgency; to focus on customer discovery as well as ask open-ended questions and listen before pitching, and to validate before building and test assumptions with real customers through experiments and MVPs.

The valuable lesson learnt was – the path from prototype to market is not just about making the technology work. It is about proving that it solves a real problem, for the right customer, in a way they are willing to pay for.

The applications for Velocity – Kotak BizLabs are currently open. To learn more and apply, please visit: https://nsrcel.org/velocity/

As part of the Healthcare Incubation Program, a CSR Initiative by DailyRounds, NSRCEL hosted a Demo Day and Corporate Venture Showcase, bringing together ventures from across the prototype, MVP, pilot and early-revenue stages, innovating across domains spanning biotechnology, medical devices, healthcare services, healthcare technology, health & wellness, and assistive technology.

At Demo Day, founders had a platform to showcase their solutions and connect with investors. Altogether 82 meetings were hosted throughout the day, aimed at helping the start-ups explore opportunities for funding, partnerships and growth.

At the Corporate Venture Showcase, also held as part of the Industry Innovation Connect initiative at NSRCEL, corporates and hospitals were featured, including Siemens Healthineers, Samyak, Apollo ProHealth, HCG, BFI, Kavach, Bigtech Labs and Superhealth.

The venture showcase created opportunities for founders to demonstrate their solutions, engage with potential partners, and explore pilots, enterprise adoption and long-term collaboration.

Journal: The Lancet Regional Health – Southeast Asia

Oral health continues to remain a neglected public health priority in India despite the substantial preventable burden of oral diseases and their shared behavioral, environmental and commercial determinants with major non-communicable diseases (NCDs). Persistent reliance on treatment-oriented care, high out-of-pocket expenditure, inequitable distribution of the dental workforce, limited public-sector capacity, fragmented governance, inadequate financing and weak surveillance mechanisms continue to constrain equitable access to oral healthcare, particularly among rural and socioeconomically disadvantaged populations. Integrating essential oral health services – including health promotion, oral cancer screening, tobacco cessation, early diagnosis, prevention and referral – within comprehensive primary healthcare offers an important pathway to strengthen health systems and advance Universal Health Coverage (UHC).

The WHO Global Oral Health Action Plan provides a strategic framework for achieving these objectives by 2030, with emphasis on integrating oral health into primary healthcare, expanding access to essential oral health services, strengthening national policy frameworks, and improving surveillance and accountability. India’s ongoing health-system reforms, particularly Ayushman Bharat and the expansion of Health and Wellness Centres, provide a critical platform for operationalizing this integration alongside NCD prevention and management. However, translating policy commitments into sustained implementation requires stronger intersectoral coordination, evidence-informed agenda-setting, implementation capacity, financing and monitoring frameworks.

Against this backdrop, the Oral Health India Summit, jointly organized by the Institute of Public Health (IPH) and Indian Institute of Management Bangalore (IIMB) on 20^th July 2026, provided a multidisciplinary platform to examine the policy and health-system dimensions of oral health in India. Bringing together policymakers, researchers, clinicians, public health practitioners, professional bodies and civil society, the summit deliberated on oral health policy and agenda-setting, dental workforce capacity and regulation, integration of oral health into primary healthcare, and the commercial determinants of oral health. Its anticipated outputs – including a policy brief for national and state-level decision-makers, an oral health policy working group, capacity-building initiatives and priorities for future research – seek to establish a coherent national implementation agenda.

Embedding oral health within UHC and primary healthcare is essential to achieving equitable, preventive and people-centered care at scale. Strengthening policy, practice, research and cross-sectoral collaboration can enable India to translate global commitments into measurable health gains and demonstrate regional leadership in advancing oral health equity.

The Post Graduate Programme in Public Policy and Management (PGPPM) at IIM Bangalore hosted a two-day edition of its annual PGPPM Policy Talk Series on 24^th and 25^th September 2026. The series brings together practitioners from governance, education, industry and public policy to engage with the PGPPM cohort on contemporary policy challenges and the practical dimensions of policy implementation.

The series opened on 24^th September with a Governance Masterclass by Shailiza Mayal, Vice President, Samagra. Her session explored what it takes to translate policy intent into effective implementation and to build public systems that deliver at scale.

The session on Day Two featured Akshay Saxena, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Avanti Fellows. His talk, titled ‘Talent is Everywhere, Opportunity is Not: Can Public Policy Create Real Educational Mobility?’, examined educational opportunity and equity, and the role public policy can play in creating pathways for high-potential students from underserved communities.

The Supply Chain Management Centre (SCMC), in association with Gurobi and DecisionOpt, hosted a special program on ‘Agentic AI for Optimization’ on 26^th September 2026.

The Centre for Software and Information Technology Management (CSITM) hosted a session on ‘Leadership in the Agentic Economy’, led by Katja Forbes, author of Machine Customers: The Evolution Has Begun and an Advisor to Forrester on Agentic Commerce. The session was held on 29^th September 2026.