Over 3,000 students from about 150 colleges across the State gathered at CODISSIA Trade Fair Complex here on Wednesday for the ICT Academy of Tamil Nadu’s day-long Youth Summit.
The annual event is held in Coimbatore for the third year and after a 10 minute presentation by each of the six finalists, two students were selected as ICTACT Youth Icons 2016.
M. Vignesh Kumar of Paavai Engineering College, Namakkal, was selected as the Youth Icon for Youth Present 2016 and RA. Kirubha Karan of Chennai Institute of Technology, Chennai, was selected as Youth Icon 2016 for Youth Talk.
About 25,000 students had applied for the contests this year and six were selected for the finals. The selection was on for the last two months. The programme here on Wednesday included a debate on employability and entrepreneurship and inspiration talks.
Speaking at the inaugural, D. R. Kaarthikeyan, former Director of Central Bureau of Investigation, urged students to be good human beings to be good leaders. The youth should take responsibility of contributing to the growth of this nation.
According to Krishnaraj Vanavarayar, chairman of Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, every individual should empower themselves to empower the country. Lakshmi Narayanan, vice-chairman of Cognizant, said youth should contribute more towards developing newer technologies and highlighted the importance of digital literacy. M. Sivakumar, chief executive officer of the ICT Academy, said each student should believe in being the change.
For the Youth Present, the runners-up were Princy Sheeba of Saranathan College of Engineering, Trichy and Delvin Hesfer of KCG College of Technology, Chennai. The runners-up for Youth Talk were B. Sowndarya of Sethu Institute of Technology, Madurai, and Leneta Christopher of Noorul Islam Centre for Higher Education, Nagarcoil.