Meet the quiet architects building India’s tech future at Nasscom Makers Honor awards

Behind India’s over $300 billion tech industry in revenue are the builders who work away from the spotlight, driving innovation, solving hard problems, and shaping what comes next. Engineers, developers, and architects aren’t just applying technology—they’re reimagining what’s possible and building the systems that power India’s digital economy. Nasscom Makers Honor, is designed to recognise these often-unseen leaders: technologists whose rigor, ingenuity, and execution are foundational to the nation’s digital future.

About the Makers Honor awards

This initiative aims to shift the focus from just business metrics to engineering excellence. It celebrates those who choose complexity over convenience, proving that India’s greatest export isn’t just services but world-class innovation.

Guided by a distinguished council of India’s most respected technical minds, including Nandini Harinath (Scientist, ISRO), Anand Deshpande (Founder, Persistent Systems), and Ankit Mehta (CEO & Co-Founder, Ideaforge Technology Ltd).

Supported by GitHub, the Nasscom Makers Honor celebrates brilliance across five distinct pillars:

• The Innovators: Visionaries creating pioneering solutions for a Viksit Bharat, sustainability, and healthcare.
• The Scale Builders: Engineers behind massive platforms and digital public goods that serve billions and safeguard mission-critical systems.
• The Open-Source Titans: Contributors advancing global frameworks through India-first AI/ML frameworks and collaborative technology foundations..
• The AI & Deep-Tech Pioneers: Builders pushing the boundaries of autonomous systems, space tech and materials science.
• The Problem Solvers: Those addressing civic and environmental challenges through digital solutions for inclusion, water security and disaster resilience.

Rajesh Nambiar, President of Nasscom, champions the view that India’s progress has long been built by engineers from ancient mathematicians and architects to today’s technologists driven by people who imagine, build, and improve. Nasscom instituted the Makers Honor to recognise individuals who don’t merely adapt to change but actively shape the future through ideas, execution, and purpose. Innovation is no longer limited to laboratories or large enterprises; it is rising from startups, open-source communities, research institutions, global capability centres, and individuals who turn problems into meaningful solutions. These stories span disciplines, sectors, and geographies, yet are united by curiosity, courage, and commitment and behind every breakthrough is a human story of persistence, learning through failure, and impact, reminding everyone that technology ultimately serves people. India’s aspirations depend on nurturing such talent and, as intelligent systems and frontier technologies advance, building not only what is new but what is responsible, trusted, and inclusive values reflected by the makers this honour seeks to recognise and amplify.

Martin Woodward, VP, Developer Relations at GitHub, said, “Software is shaping the future, and with more than 18 million developers building on GitHub in India and the second-largest contributor to open source, the country is leading the charge. We are honoured to partner with Nasscom to help them bring much-deserved recognition to the individuals who are driving this global technological revolution from the cities, towns and villages all across India.”

A closer look at the winning entries

The inaugural cohort of winners of Nasscom Makers Honor represents the cream of Indian engineering, who have worked their hands on everything from hackable hardware to planetary-scale health systems. Their work stands out not just because of what it does, but because of the deep technical hurdles they overcame to build it. Read on to know more about the winners.

The Innovators: Shoaib Merchant and Nitish Shrivastava

Shoaib Merchant challenged the modern paradox of computing – we have more power than ever, yet our devices are more closed and difficult to customise. Over four years, he led a global team of over 50 engineers and designers to build Mecha Comet, a modular, handheld Linux computer. What makes this invention special is its ‘first principles’ design. This means that it is open and hackable from the circuit board to the firmware. It’s a pocket laboratory that allows engineers to plug in custom sensors and radios, returning the power of exploration to the user.

Nitish Shrivastava saw a different problem, the trust gap in Enterprise AI, and this is what he attempted to solve. While the world was caught up in the hype of consumer chatbots, Nitish was building SASVA™, an AI architecture designed for the high-stakes environments of aviation and finance. SASVA™ is unique because it achieves production-grade performance on existing hardware and CPUs, allowing companies to run powerful AI on-premise without their sensitive data ever leaving their own walls.

Open Source & DeepTech: Rushabh Mehta and Rajesh Kumar

Rushabh Mehta has spent two decades proving that India can lead the global open-source movement. He built the Frappe Framework and ERPNext, making enterprise software affordable and usable. His achievement lies in engineering that stays, maintaining code in public for over 15 years and building a community that has grown to over 31,000 GitHub stars.

Rajesh Kumar is an innovator in the field of robotics. He is leading the shift from “scripted motion” to “autonomous action”. At Addverb Technologies, he is developing humanoid and quadruped robots that don’t just follow a pre-coded path but use physical AI to interpret their surroundings. By solving the complex engineering of dual-arm coordination and all-terrain walking, his work is turning robots into intelligent collaborators on the factory floor.

Scaling for Society: Dr Ranjit Date and Bodhish Thomas

Dr Ranjit Date represents the discipline of engineering that ships and survives. He grew Precision Automation & Robotics India (PARI), born in Pune, into a global automation giant by solving problems that constrained Indian manufacturing, such as developing the country’s earliest servo-controlled robots. His work proves that Indian-designed industrial systems can compete and win on the global stage, with about 70 per cent of his business serving international markets. PARI later became Wipro-PARI with reported revenues to the range of US$ 500 million and an 8000-employee strong global workforce.

Finally, Bodhish Thomas addressed the fragmented nature of public healthcare. He co-founded the Open Healthcare Network Foundation to build CARE, an open-source operating system for health programs. Instead of building new software for every hospital, CARE provides a single digital backbone with CARE-based deployments running across 10 Indian states. It currently powers the state-wide palliative-care grid in Kerala and supports TeleICU rounds across 28 per cent of India’s districts, proving that great architecture can scale to save lives. In Kerala, the grid has over 220000 patients and has recorded over one million home visits.

Voices from the jury

The jury members, each a pioneer in their own right, spoke about how this honor is a long-overdue tribute to the spirit of purposeful building.

Nandini Harinath, Scientist at ISRO, who played a key role in the Mars Orbiter Mission, reminds us that the best work is often done in the shadows. “Some of the greatest leaps in science and society are made not in the spotlight, but in silence. The Nasscom Makers Honor is an excellent initiative from Nasscom to celebrate minds who push the boundaries of possibility and bring science and technology closer to everyday life,” she said.

Echoing this sentiment, Ankit Mehta, CEO & Co-Founder of IdeaForge, highlighted how these stories can serve as a blueprint for the next generation of engineers and said: “India’s engineers have always risen to meet the world’s most complex challenges with extraordinary ingenuity and resilience, but often without fanfare. Through Makers Honor, we are recognising not just technical excellence but also the spirit of problem-solving and purposeful innovation that drives our nation forward. This initiative will inspire young minds to dream beyond conventional boundaries and reaffirm the pivotal role of engineers as the architects of a better, more inclusive future.”

Building on the idea of purpose, Anand Deshpande, Founder of Persistent Systems, said that the true value of engineering lies in its human impact. “Engineering is not just about building systems, but also about solving the right problems with creativity and compassion. This is a tribute to those who build with skill, vision and create impact that transcends code and systems,” he said.

Conclusion

The Nasscom Nasscom Makers Honor is a record of India’s evolution into a global product and innovation hub. By shining a light on these six pioneers, the initiative reminds us that the future is not just something that happens to us, but is something that is built, one line of code and one modular circuit at a time.

Note to the Reader: This article has been produced on behalf of the brand by HT Brand Studio and does not have journalistic/editorial involvement of Mint.