Ranchi, Feb. 3: The second day of the BIT-Mesra tech meet, Unnayan 2005, started on a creative note with Srijan, a hardware and software designing contest.

As part of the Vaarta series of lectures, the institute had invited Yasvant Kanetkar, whose books on computer programming feature on all college syllabuses.

Kanetkar is the author of books, Let us C, Let us C++, Pointers in C and Data structures through C++.

?Indians are globally recognised for their work in the software industry. But an Indian product is still not used as commonly as Power-point or Word application. Our skills in the software services sector have been acknowledged because of Infosys and TCS but we need to go further,? said Kanetkar.

Kanetkar spoke on the qualities that the software industry looks for in a prospective employee such as knowledge, social skills, work approach, business acumen, foresight, vision, leadership and cost consciousness. Kanetkar also spoke at length on the dot net revolution.

?He is the author of the programming texts that we use. The lecture was bound to be very interesting,? a student said. The second lecture was provided by Raja Natesan, president and CEO of the technology arm of Inter Globe and Galileo India.

Natesan, a graduate from BITS Pilani with a management degree from IIM, Bangalore, spoke on the factors that go into success.

Students also took part in Aakriti, another hardware and software design contest. ?The competition tests us both on creativity and technical knowhow. We have been given 24 hours to come up with ideas,? said Vipin, an electrical engineering student.

Brajesh Verma?s real-time surveillance system drew wows from fellow students. Vikas Tante and Dushyant Srivastava of BIT-Mesra designed a security and maintenance system for laboratories.

Thirteen students took part in the software and six in the hardware presentation contest of Srijan.