Indian PM urges tech community to participate in Aatmanirbhar Bharat App Innovation Challenge

In a post published on LinkedIn, the Indian Prime Minister mentioned India’s vibrant tech and startup ecosystem and how youngsters have excelled in providing tech solutions across sectors. He said there is a lot of enthusiasm among the startup and tech ecosystem to innovate, develop, and promote homegrown apps. It adds that while the nation is working towards creating an Aatmanirbhar Bharat. It is an excellent opportunity to give direction and momentum to evolve apps that can satisfy our market and compete with the world.

With this objective in mind, the Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology and the Atal Innovation Mission have developed the Aatmanirbhar Bharat App Innovation challenge, which will run in two tracks: promoting existing apps and developing new apps. The Government and tech community members will jointly host this challenge to make it more holistic.

The Government will provide mentoring, hand-holding, and support for promoting existing apps and platforms across e-learning, work-from-home, gaming, business, entertainment, office utilities, and social networking. Track-01 will work in mission mode to identify useful quality apps for the leaderboard and shall be completed in around a month. For incubating new apps and platforms, the Track-02 initiative will help create new champions in India by providing support in ideation, incubation, prototyping, rollout, and market access.

The Prime Minister wrote that this challenge will give better visibility and clarity to existing apps to achieve their goals and create tech products to find solutions to tech puzzles with the help of mentorship, tech support, and guidance during the entire life-cycle.

The prime minister shared ideas and asked if technology can help make traditional Indian games more accessible. If apps are developed to help people in rehabilitation or get counselling or with targeted and intelligent access to the suitable age group for learning, gaming, etc., can be developed. He urged the tech community to participate and help create an Aatmanirbhar App Ecosystem.

Startup India initiative aims to foster entrepreneurship and promote innovation by creating an ecosystem that is conducive to the growth of Startups. The objective is that India must become a nation of job creators instead of job seekers. The Prime Minister of India will launch the initiative on January 16, 2016. The event was attended by many young Indian entrepreneurs (over 2000) who have embarked on entrepreneurship through Startups. As a vital component of this “Startup India” launch, the Government of India is organizing a global workshop on “Innovation and Startups” on January 16, 2016.

Shri Narendra Modi, Prime Minister of India, will occasionally be the Chief Guest. This workshop aims to provide a platform for all stakeholders, stimulate dialogue on key challenges that the Indian innovation ecosystem currently faces, and provide potential solutions to address them. Fostering a fruitful culture of innovation in the country is a long and remarkable journey. This initiative will significantly reinforce India’s commitment to making India the hub of innovation, design, and Startups. (Press Release ID: 1636428 – PIB – India)