The Startup Village Phase 2, in tune with the Prime Minister’s Startup India programme, will focus on creating an entrepreneurial culture amongst the country’s five million engineering students by providing them a completely digital incubation framework, ranging from application for admission to teaching, mentoring and graduation.
CM Pinarayi Vijayan will launch SV.CO, the world’s first digital incubator for student startups on July 13 at Thiruvananthapuram. India needs more than one million new jobs a month for the next 20 years to employ all its youth and these jobs would mostly come from new startups if the right environment is created.
The Digital Incubator, which was built over the last 12 months, has already received more than 1,000 applications from students from across Kerala and towns like Vadodara in Gujarat and Vishakhapatnam in Andhra Pradesh in its beta stage.
The Phase 2 of Startup Village comes in the wake of Department of Science and Technology approving the project completion report of Phase 1 (2012-15) of the national award winning incubator. Its original mandate was to incubate 48 startups during this period, but it went on to receive an overwhelming 6,000 plus applications. Also, 3,000 new jobs were created by the young startups, which raised more than Rs 45 crore in funding.
Started as an experiment in 2012, Startup Village is a pioneer in the incubation ecosystem in the country with its bold experiments and PPP structure, which allowed for fruitful government-industry-academia collaborations.
