KUALA LUMPUR (July 15): Impactful, relevant, and sustainable. These are the three tenets that make the foundation of the Sustainathon, a competition designed to empower university students to create sustainable technology solutions. 

The Sustainathon, organised by Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), was first held in Singapore in 2020, and the competition has expanded worldwide ever since. 

TCS is an Indian multinational information technology (IT) services and consulting company and a subsidiary of Tata Group, one of the largest conglomerates in India with 150 years of history. 

Jeevan Rajoo, the TCS Malaysia country head and a board member, says the Sustainathon is a movement that elevates the voices of youth in every country of operation. It exists to provide them with a platform to express their ideas, and support the evolution of ideas into businesses.

“We wanted to invoke fresh ideas from youngsters in a space where they are able to create impact, and secondly, the idea should have meaning to the participants as well as to the recipients in that context.

“The idea was to use technologies and means to create impactful solutions to address a particular pain point in society,” he says.

Solutions presented at the Sustainathon are of interest to TCS, as they prioritise ideas that are aligned with the company’s objectives, along with its feasibility for implementation in their operations.

Each Sustainathon theme is ideated from current societal problems that need to be addressed. The theme for this year’s Sustainathon in Malaysia revolved around women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), and the winning group, VirtuLearn, consisted of three girls with the idea to create an interactive textbook with augmented reality for efficient learning. 

“Joining the Sustainathon has definitely changed our perspective, both on ourselves and everything as a whole. We never imagined ourselves going on stage or being shortlisted, so this was quite a big boost of confidence for each of us,” says Chow Xin Ying, the team lead of VirtuLearn, on their Sustainathon experience. 

“This has given us the encouragement and the determination to seize every moment and opportunity, [and] we are now much more courageous to challenge ourselves.” 

To further empower students, TCS provides the participants with mentorship programmes to hone and fine-tune their solutions for the final presentation. The mentors provided come from the industry and are clients and associate partners of TCS. 

“All of them received mentorship programmes before they went to the finals. We want to encourage them to think differently, act differently, so that what exposure they get from school might be insufficient when they come out to the real world when they do pitches,” says Jeevan.

The Sustainathon, being a relatively fresh competition of university students, has not yet seen any ideas turn to fully fledged businesses, but TCS is firm in their stance of providing technological support should competitors wish to take their solutions further. 

“Some of them are final-year students, some of them have not finished university, so we are waiting for them to come out from universities with these ideas. It is up to them also whether they still have the same passion to pursue this into a start-up or a collaboration,” Jeevan says.

“TCS as an organisation is more than willing to support them technologically and also open doors for them.”

In the coming years, he hopes to see more impactful outcomes from future Sustainathons, and looks forward to inculcating the passion for youths and other companies to do good. 

“Our vision is hopefully one day, somewhere very close to the future, that we will have a stadium full of youngsters pitching ideas on solutions that impact society. And this should be the premier brand for youths who want to associate themselves with giving back to society,” says Jeevan.