Amritsar, NFAPost: To boost homegrown startups and software product companies, the government has launched a contest — “Chunauti” – Next Generation Startup Challenge Contest, with special focus on firms from small towns of India.
Through this contest, the government aims at identifying around 300 startups working and provide them with seed funding of up to 2.5 million rupees, along with other support.
The government has earmarked a budget of 950 million rupees over a period of three years for this scheme, which was launched by Union Minister for Electronics and Information Technology Ravi Shankar Prasad.
The contest will aim at identifying startups in areas such as agri-tech, edtech, and fintech, solutions, supply chain, logistics and transportation management, and infrastructure and remote monitoring.
It would also include startups in the areas of healthcare, diagnostic, preventive and psychological care, jobs and skilling, linguistic tools, and technologies.
This new contest comes after the Centre had already flagged off contests to promote Made In India video conferencing tools, chip companies and locally made mobile applications.
Apart from the seed funding, the startups selected through this contest will be given incubation facilities, mentorship, security testing facilities, access to venture capitalist funding, industry connect, as well as advisories in Human Resource (HR), legal, IPR and Patent matters.
“Besides seed fund of upto Rs. 25 Lakh (2.5 million rupees), the startups will also be provided cloud credits from leading cloud service providers. Start-ups who are in the ideation stage may be selected under the pre-incubation programme and mentored for up to six months to evolve their business plan and solution around the proposed idea,” the government said in a statement.
Each selected startup under pre-incubation will be paid 10,000 rupees per month up to a period of six months, the government said.
The last date of application for the contest is set on September 7, 2020.
