About Carbon Zero Challenge

It is an all India Eco-innovation and Entrepreneurship contest with a vision to “ To create a global impact by addressing three major Planetary crisis – Resource Depletion, Pollution, and Climate change through powerful interventions, innovative technologies, entrepreneurship, and policy interventions”. The primary goal of the contest is to foster cutting-edge deep-tech and circular economy solutions that address Environment challenges in Energy, Materials, Agriculture, Air and Water domains. By leveraging the collective ingenuity and expertise of talented individuals from across India, the challenge seeks to build eco-start-ups which can address the planetary crises such as Climate change, Pollution and Food security.

The program’s motto ‘Ideate, Innovate, Incubate’ essentially summarise IIT Madras’s continuous efforts to enable an ecosystem where students/early stage start-ups from across the country ideate and innovate for the greater good of society and incubate start-ups to become job creators.

The contest’s uniqueness lies in the fact that it is one-of-its-kind initiative in its category that exclusively focuses on energy and environment technological innovations at a national level and supports the eco-entrepreneurs.

Carbon Zero Challenge (CZC) initiative was conceived at IIT Madras in 2017. It is CSR funded initiaive and was supported by U S Consulate Chennai, Polaris (a Virtusa company), Thales and Aquamap.

CZC initiative identifies, mentors, and financially supports sustainable innovations across India.