In association with the universities and printing institutions in India, OPA has been organising the Print Olympiad since 2014. During the preliminary rounds, the competition selects the best print students among the four zones (East, West, North and South) and thereafter, during the national finale, the winner is selected from the top four candidates.

Kamal Chopra, project chairman, spoke about how OPA intends to recognise the top print student in India with the Print Olympiad. The project aims to inspire students of printing and packaging technology to broaden their learning beyond the confines of textbooks. This remarkable competition is made possible through collaborative partnerships with leading universities and printing institutions across the nation.

The East zone final was held at Kolkata’s RIPT, Jadavpur University. The event was moderated by coordinators of EZPO, Arpitam Chatterjee, associate professor, department of printing engineering and Shankhya Debnath, lecturer - department of printing technology, RIPT. 

Six finalists competed: Shadab Alam, Vishwarup De, Harshit Chaturvedi, Suyash Srivastava of Jadavpur University; and Oishi Chakraborty, Waliul Haque of RIPT. Each student had to select a topic, out of five, and deliver a speech for at least five minutes. A five-member jury evaluated each topic. The final was judged by a panel that comprised: Amitabh Luthra, director, Printers Supply, Kolkata; Saptangshu Chaudhuri, associate vice-president-production, ABP; Subhrajit Ray, press and forms manager, Government of West Bengal. Shilpi Naskar, assistant professor, department of printing engineering, Jadavpur University and Krishnendu Halder, head of department and lecturer, department of printing technology, RIPT.

Shadab Alam of Jadavpur University was recognised as the winner and received the award for ‘Top Print Student East zone’. He will now compete with the three regional winners of North, South and West in the national final to be held in September 2024.

Director of Technical Education and Training, Government of West Bengal, Jayanta Banerjee was invited as the chief guest at the event. He emphasised the importance of entrepreneurship, “Entrepreneurship requires a diverse skill set including problem-solving, communication, leadership, and financial management. Engaging in entrepreneurial activities helps students develop and refine these skills, which are valuable in both personal and professional life.”

Meet Jain, director, Stylo Media was the guest of honour. Haroprosad Mondal, principal-in-charge of the institute was the chief patron of the event. Manu Choudhury, director, CDC Printers served as the keynote speaker.

In his keynote address, Choudhury highlighted generative artificial intelligence (AI) in the printing industry, "Generative AI refers to a class of AI algorithms and models designed to generate new content, such as images, text, music, or other forms of media, that is like what it has been trained on. These models are often based on deep learning architectures, particularly variants of neural networks like generative adversarial networks (GANs) or autoregressive models like transformers."

Director of CDC Printers, Manu Choudhury laid emphasis on generative AI in his keynote

He explained, "The idea behind generative AI is to enable machines to create content that is realistic and coherent, resembling what a human might produce. This can have various applications, from generating artwork and music to creating realistic images or even assisting in content creation tasks like text summarization or language translation." Although a quick and efficient process, it poses ethical concerns such as the potential for generating misleading content or deepfakes, which are digitally manipulated images or videos that appear real but are synthetic. Hence, there is ongoing research into developing safeguards and verification methods to mitigate these risks while harnessing the creative potential of generative AI.

The dignitaries were felicitated by Kamal Mohan Chopra on behalf of OPA and Haroprosad Mondal on behalf of RIPT.