Of all the start-ups, the ones that attend to the social problems attract the eyeballs of investors most. Banyan Nation has won the accolades as it won the Innovate Digital India Challenge 2.0. The start-up has developed a technology-based ‘smart’ solution that can help civic bodies manage waste in a very efficient way.

Held jointly by Intel, the Department of Science and Technology and T-Hub, the second edition of the Challenge aimed at identifying and incubating home-grown entrepreneurial solutions that address India’s indigenous issues.

Incubated at the tech incubator T-Hub, Banyan Nation or Banyan Sustainable Waste Management Private Ltd has developed a zero-waste platform based on an Intel Edison board for Arduino, Intel IoT analytics platform and the Intel-powered Jan Unnati tablet to streamline and automate urban recycling operations at every stage.

The start-up is presently doing a programme for the civic body in Warangal. It deployed real-time monitoring devices, on-field bin sensors, GPS truck routers, landfill management toolkits and back-end visualisation and analytic engines to monitor and synchronize waste management.

“Combining informatics and hardware engineering, Banyan Nation system aims to root out bottlenecks in India’s recycling value chain,” the organisers said, while announcing them as the grand winner in the challenge.

The start-up has developed a modular system, customizable to the requirements of different municipalities and third-party system integrators.

Prakash Mallya, Managing Director (Sales, Marketing Group) of Intel Technology India, said that this year’s innovation challenge had an expanded scope as it included categories like smart city and sustainability.

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