- Home
- About
- Globally Speaking
- Videos
- Podcast
- Geopolitics
- Industry
- SIGN UP
The Indian government has launched a new initiative to handhold innovative ideas spawned by underprivileged techies and take them from concept to cash flows as part of its ambitious Start-up India initiative.
This is vintage Narendra Modi at his most creative. Combining financial and social inclusion with cutting edge
innovation, his government recently launched a scheme to support and help Dalits refine raw but pioneering start-up ideas into commercially viable business models. The target: Create 1,000 such start-ups over the next year.
In the traditional Indian caste system, Dalits are members of the lowest caste. They have, historically, faced many social injustices. To help mitigate several millennia of social ostracization that still continues in some areas, the government has come out with a series of affirmative action measures, including reservations in jobs and educational institutions to help Dalits overcome the handicap of birth and claim their place as equal citizens of the world's largest democracy. Despite these measures, Dalits remain under-represented in many sectors compared, including in business ownership.
Thus, the Ambedkar Social Innovation Incubation Mission (ASIIM), named after the great Dalit leader, social reformer and writer of the Indian Constitution Dr B.R. Ambedkar, is an effort that takes forward the goal of social and financial inclusion within the overall ambit of the Prime Minister's ambitious Start-up India initiative to turn India into a global innovation hub.
To achieve this goal and in a bid to strengthen the start-up ecosystem in the country, the government has launched the Start-up India Hub, a virtual online platform for all stakeholders of the entrepreneurial ecosystem in India to discover, connect, and engage with each other.
More to read:
But despite India's enviable status as the world's third largest start-up hub, Dalits remain under-represented, in proportion to their share of the Indian population, here as well. Perhaps wary of the uncertainties associated with innovation and entrepreneurship and also because many still lack access to the right channels, they have preferred the safer option of taking up regular employment.
The ASIIM initiative is yet another attempt to correct this skew that is tilted against Dalit innovators and bring them into the mainstream. The scheme, which will run from 2020-2024 will have a corpus of more than $40 million. This money will be channelled through the Social Justice Ministry's venture capital fund for Scheduled Castes, which is managed by IFCI Venture Capital Fund, a central public sector unit.
Perhaps wary of the uncertainties associated with innovation and entrepreneurship and also because many still lack access to the right channels, they have preferred the safer option of taking up regular employment.
The scheme envisages selecting the best start-up ideas proposed by Dalit entrepreneurs and handholding them from concept through the development stage into innovative products, services and solutions to problems that businesses and people face. The ASIIM initiative also proposes to set up a business incubator hub that will incubate ideas proposed by Dalit techies and help them with technical support and finance for a period of three years, by connecting them with leading technology institutions. This business incubator will be supported by professionals like lawyers, chartered accounts, marketing experts, advertising agencies and others who will help the Dalit techies take their innovative ideas from concept to cash flows.
The idea is to help these start-ups come up with breakthrough ideas that will spawn, if not the next Amazon, Google, Facebook or Alibaba, then at least their homegrown and homebred equivalents.
Still more to read:
But before that can happen, the Indian innovation eco-system will have to undergo a structural change. The US, for instance, has 1,300 venture funds in operation, it has 900 angel investor networks and more than one million individuals who back innovators with money and support; the UK has more than 700 VCs. India, on the other hand, has only 156 homegrown VCs.
The argument that the larger VCs operate internationally and that good ideas do not languish for want of adequate funding does not hold. Their operations in India are limited to the big cities only. To assume that innovation is the exclusive preserve of IIT-IIM-IISc-educated elite is to insult the spirit of entrepreneurship that exists in the Indian heartland where many of the Dalit techies targeted by the ASIIM scheme live. They may lack the PowerPoint presentation skills of their big city counterparts but their ideas and talent may be no less innovative and worthy of funding.
The scheme envisages selecting the best start-up ideas proposed by Dalit entrepreneurs and handholding them from concept through the development stage into innovative products, services and solutions to problems that businesses and people face.
The Byju's, Flipkarts, Snapdeals, Olas and Quikrs of this world will no doubt continue to attract the headlines and draw the top investment dollars. But for India to truly emerge as a global innovation hub, the small-town boys at the bottom of the pyramid must also be given their voice. The ASIIM initiative addresses this gap in India's start-up eco-system.