Current Affairs: Prime Minister Narendra Modi, during his US visit, announced the launch of $150 million Bharat Fund, aimed at creating and providing support to disruptive startups in impact areas.
The announcement was made at the India-US Startup Konnect organized by Nassocom, TiE Silicon Valley and IIM-Ahmedabad’s Centre for Innovation, Incubation and Entrepreneurship (CIIE), on the sidelines of his visit to Silicon Valley.
The Bharat Fund is an endeavour to bring together government, academia and corporates to create an enabling ecosystem and encourage youth to solve India’s key problems by providing them risk-capital, prototyping support, guidance and market-access.
The fund aims at catalysing over $150 mn for innovative Indian startups through a venture fund and, in addition to capital, provide technical support to entrepreneurs.
The Fund aims to rope in corporates, financial investors and donors to contribute towards strengthening the impact-innovation ecosystem in India.
The Bharat Fund is a public-private-academia partnership set up by Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Ahmedabad’s Centre for Innovation Incubation and Entrepreneurship (CIIE).
The objective of the fund, inter-alia, is to support and provide funding (grants, seed capital, venture capital) and business support to innovation-driven start-ups that solve real problems faced by the masses of India through technology-enabled and rapidly scalable solutions and will focus on – healthcare and life-sciences (including biotech, medical devises), sustainability (energy, agriculture, environment, water), and digital technologies (especially in manufacturing, design).
The Bharat Fund shall be managed and coordinated by CIIE at the IIM, Ahmedabad.
As informed by IIM, Ahmedabad, the process involved shall include problem identification and crowd-sourcing of solutions, Expert Screening and Independent Investment Committee and Active Mentoring and Business Support for selection of beneficiaries.
Bharat Fund will also organize accelerator and grant challenge program to source ideas for specific problems that may need new effective solutions to be created.