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33K Participants from 18 countries advance to the Unstop World Cup Final
Mumbai: Unstop, the community engagement and hiring platform for students and graduates, has announced the finalists of its ‘World’s Biggest Cricket Quiz Festival’.
1 The quiz saw a total of 33,000 participants hailing from 18 countries, primarily India, the United States, and Bangladesh, vying for the prize pool of Rs 4,00,000.
2 Unstop conducted 45 daily quizzes throughout the tournament, with six questions for every player to ace.
3 The grand finale of the Unstop World Cup Cricket Quiz Festival will be conducted on 18 November, a day prior to the finale of the 2023 ICC Men’s Cricket World Cup.
4 The top six are Tushar Kanda from NIT Karnataka, Surathkal; Madhav Kedia; Pradhyumna R from PES University, Bengaluru; Preetham Upadhyay from Barclays; Abhishikth Boda from IIT, Sri City; and Saswata Panigrahi, an alumnus of IIM Ahmedabad.
The winner of the Grand Finale shall be crowned the World Cricket Quiz Champion and will take home a prize money of Rs 1,00,000, while the runner-ups receive Rs 50,000 and Rs 30,000 each. There are cash prizes for all other finalists along with Amazon Vouchers, a subscription to OTT Play for the top 100 players. All participants receive a subscription to Unstop Pro.
The finale will see Arun Lal, ex Indian cricketer and commentator, and Sresth Shah, editor, and journalist at ESPNcricinfo, as celebrity guest quiz masters posing questions to the finalists.
Unstop founder and CEO Ankit Aggarwal said, “Cricket is one game that brings together millions and we’ve been cheering for #Unstoppable Team India since day 1. This quiz was indeed a wonderful experience of giving our community of young talent a digital playground to showcase their best shots!”
Unstop VP marketing & growth Alekhya Chakrabarty added, “We felt it is natural to combine quizzing with the cricket world cup to come up with this competition for our community. The quiz saw stellar participation and I’m glad all participants could connect with their inner fan through it. Super excited for both the finals on 18 & 19 November.”
Reflecting on the experience, one of the finalists, Preetham Upadhyay said, “I used to look forward to the Unstop Cricket quiz at 6 PM, as much as the actual matches at 2 PM, and this had become a daily ritual over the last month all through the world cup. It was overall a fun and challenging experience as questions and scoring evolved through the festival.”
Tune in to watch the finale on 18 November at 4:30 PM on www.unstop.com and their Youtube channel Unstop_World. An exciting day when they’ll be playing the final innings with the top 6 and announcing the winners to present them with their much-deserved rewards!
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Samsung certifies 1,000 Maharashtra students in AI and coding
The South Korean electronics giant marks its first large-scale skilling push in the state, with women making up nearly half the national programme’s enrolment
PUNE: Samsung has put 1,000 students in Maharashtra through a certified training programme in artificial intelligence and coding, the largest such drive the South Korean electronics company has run in the state and a signal that corporate India’s skilling ambitions are moving well beyond the boardroom brochure.
The certifications were awarded under Samsung Innovation Campus (SIC), the company’s flagship corporate social responsibility programme, which launched in India in 2022 with the stated aim of democratising access to future-technology education. The 1,000 graduates were drawn from four institutions: 127 from Savitribai Phule Pune University, 373 from Pimpri Chinchwad University, 250 from D.Y. Patil University’s Ramrao Adik Institute of Technology and 250 from Anjuman-I-Islam’s Kalsekar Technical Campus. All completed training in either AI or coding and programming, the two disciplines Samsung has identified as the critical pillars of the digital economy.
The programme does not stop at technical training. Soft-skills development and career-readiness modules are baked into the curriculum, a deliberate attempt to close the gap between what universities teach and what employers actually want.
“India’s digital growth story will ultimately be shaped by the quality of its talent pipeline,” said Shubham Mukherjee, head of CSR and corporate communications at Samsung Southwest Asia. “As technologies like AI move from the periphery to the core of industries, skilling must evolve from basic training to building real-world capability. This milestone in Maharashtra reflects how industry and academia can come together to create a future-ready workforce that is both globally competitive and locally relevant.”
The Maharashtra drive sits within a rapidly scaling national effort. Samsung Innovation Campus trained 20,000 young people across India in 2025, hitting its stated target for the year. Women account for 48 per cent of national enrolments, a figure the company cites as evidence of its push for an inclusive technology ecosystem. The programme is implemented in partnership with the Electronics Sector Skills Council of India and the Telecom Sector Skill Council.
Samsung, which is marking 30 years in India this year, runs SIC alongside two other initiatives, Samsung Solve for Tomorrow and Samsung DOST, as part of a broader effort to build what it calls a generation of innovators with both the technical depth and the problem-solving mindset to thrive in a fast-moving digital world.
A thousand certified students is a tidy headline. Whether they find jobs that match their new skills is the harder question, and the one that will ultimately determine whether corporate skilling programmes like this one are genuine pipelines or well-photographed gestures.
