Centre to set up 50 incubation centres

The Centre will set up 50 incubation centres across the country within the current year, according to R. Ramanan, Mission Director, Atal Innovation Mission, NITI AAYOG, New Delhi.

Speaking to reporters on the sidelines of an interaction with the Atal Innovation Mission Team at TREC-STEP (Tiruchirappalli Regional Engineering College Science and Technology Entrepreneurs Park), which has received Atal Innovation Mission's scale up support for established incubation centres project, Mr. Ramanan said the mission was aimed at extending support to establish new incubation centres called Atal Incubation Centres (AICs) that would nurture innovative start-up businesses in their pursuit to become scalable and sustainable enterprises.

World class incubation facilities would be established in different parts of the country with suitable physical infrastructure in terms of capital equipment and operating facilities, coupled with the availability of sectoral experts for mentoring the start-ups, business planning support, access to seed capital, industry partners, trainings and other relevant components required for encouraging innovative start-ups. Moreover, exclusive incubation centres would be set up for specific fields such as manufacturing, transport, energy, health, education, agriculture, water and sanitation.

Mr. Ramanan said that out of 50 incubation centres, 19 centres had been selected to scale up their operation to support start-ups. Each centre would be provided with a grant-in-aid of up to Rs. 10 crore over a period of a maximum of 5 years to cover the capital and operational expenditure to establish the Atal Incubation Centre.

A total of 318 start-ups were associated with 19 centres. It was expected that the number of start-ups would go up to at least 1,000 by the time when 50 centres were established. Besides supporting incubators associated with high educational institutions and Research and Development Centres, the incubators promoted by industrial houses, industry clusters and industrial bodies would also be extended scale-up support.

Mr. Ramanan added that 2,400 schools across the country had been selected to set up Atal Tinkering Lab in order to encourage students to use the facilities for designing or modeling innovative products. It was aimed at creating innovative mindset and promoting innovation at tender age itself. Of them, 1,000 schools had been extended funding to establish lab.

R.M.P. Jawahar, Executive Director, TREC-STEP, said it had set up a technology business incubation centre in Chennai with the support of NITI AAYOG. It would in no way affect the day-to-day affairs of TREC-STEP in Tiruchi. The Chennai centre would provide much needed support to the entrepreneurs in Chennai and other parts of the State.

Source