Govt sets up incubation centre at Delhi varsity for electronic start-ups

Electropreneur Park will incubate 50 early-stage electronics start-ups in five years

Union Minister of Electronics and Information Technology Ravi Shankar Prasad on Saturday inaugurated the Electropreneur Park — an incubation centre to support start-ups in electronics — at University of Delhi’s South Campus to support the government’s aims to promote manufacturing in the sector.

The park will incubate 50 early stage start-ups and create at least five global companies over a period of five years.

“We have decided to make India a big hub of electronics manufacturing including mobile phones. In the last one year, we have manufactured 11 crore mobile phones in India,” Prasad said at the launch here.

He added that programmes like Digital India were a game changer.

“The Digital India programme aims to make India a digitally empowered society. We are creating infrastructure, and we are promoting digital delivery of services and digital literacy. If you encourage digital connectivity in a big way, you are making life simpler and promoting good governance,” the minister said.

The Electropreneur Park has already incubated six early stage start-ups, with a few more in the process of on-boarding. The start-ups under incubation were awarded the admission certificates during the inauguration of the centre. They were selected based on the evaluation of about 200 proposals that were received.

The park will focus on IP (intellectual property) creation and product development that will lead to increased domestic value addition and witness a unique integration of academia, industry, government and other incubation ecosystem elements.

The platform will also encourage R&D (research and development), innovation and entrepreneurship in the electronic systems design and manufacturing (ESDM) sector in the country and provide assistance during prototyping, development and commercialisation for the products conceptualised at the Electropreneur Park.

Funded by the ministry of electronics and information technology (MeitY), the Electropreneur Park is an incubation centre under public-private partnership mode in the ESDM sector.

The initiative will provide the selected entrepreneurs with state-of-the-art laboratories as per international standard, ESDM mentorship by industry veterans and academics, an efficient supply chain and an ecosystem that will bring in a bouquet of shared services and facilities to the incubatees like taxation, legal, finance, accounting, patent search, training, interns and business counselling.

The park will also provide access to funding agencies to facilitate seed funding for promising ventures and ensure a smooth transition from an incubatee to a self-sufficient electronics company.