Atal Innovation Mission Extended

Atal Innovation Mission UPSC: Relevance

• GS 2: Government policies and interventions for development in various sectors and issues arising out of their design and implementation.

Atal Innovation Mission: Context

• Recently, the cabinet has approved the extension of Atal Innovation Mission till March 2023.

Atal Innovation Mission: Key points

• The AIM shall work on its intended target of creating an innovation culture and entrepreneurial ecosystem in the country.
• The total budgetary expenditure that will be incurred is more than Rs.2000 crores.

AIM 2.0 Targets

• Establishing 10000 Atal Tinkering Labs (ATLs),
• Establishing 101 Atal Incubation Centers (AICs),
• Establishing 50 Atal Community Innovation Centers (ACICs) and
• Supporting 200 startups via the Atal New India Challenges.

What is Atal Innovation Mission?

• Atal Innovation Mission has been set up under the NITI Aayog, in accordance with the Finance Minister’s declaration in the 2015 Budget Speech.
• Atal Innovation Mission is a flagship initiative of Government of India to create and promote a culture of innovation and entrepreneurship across the length and breadth of our country.
• AIM objectives: The objectives of the AIM are to create and promote an ecosystem of innovation and entrepreneurship across the country via interventions at school, university, research institutions, MSME and industry levels.
• The AIM has focused on both infrastructure creation and institution building.

AIM and innovation

• Over the past years, the AIM has worked to provide an institutional mechanism to integrate innovation activities across the country.
• Through its programmes, it has brought innovation to lakhs of school children.
• The AIM supported startups have raised 2000+ Crores from the government and private equity investors and have created several thousand jobs.
• The AIM has also executed several innovation challenges on topics of national interest.
• Together, the programmes of AIM cover 34 states and Union Territories with the goal of leveraging India’s demographic dividend by inspiring greater participation in the innovation ecosystem.

AIM international projects

• The AIM has created bilateral relations with various international agencies for building synergistic collaboration on innovation and entrepreneurship such as the AIM – SIRIUS Student Innovation exchange program with Russia, AIM – ICDK (Innovation Centre Denmark) Water Challenge with Denmark, and IACE (India Australian Circular Economy Hackathon) with Australia.
• The AIMs played a pivotal role in the success of InSpreneur, an Innovation Startup Summit hosted between India and Singapore.
• The AIM partnered with the Ministry of Defence to set up the Defence Innovation Organization which is fostering innovation as well as procurement in the defense sector.

AIM sub-schemes

Atal Tinkering Labs (ATLs)

• ATL is a state-of-the-art space established in a school with a goal to foster curiosity and innovation in young minds, between grade 6th to 12th across the country through 21st century tools and technologies.
• The technology includes Internet of Things, 3D printing, rapid prototyping tools, robotics, miniaturized electronics, do-it-yourself kits and many more.
• The aim is to stimulate a problem-solving innovative mindset within the children of the ATL and nearby communities.

Atal Incubation Centers (AICs)

• AIM has been establishing world class incubators called Atal Incubation Centres (AICs) at universities to create an ever-evolving ecosystem of start-ups and entrepreneurs.
• These Centres aim to foster and support world class innovation, dynamic entrepreneurs who want to build scalable and sustainable enterprises.

Atal Community Innovation Centers (ACICs)

• AIM is setting up Atal Community Innovation Centres with a unique partnership driven model to promote the benefits of technology led innovation to the unserved/underserved regions of India including Tier 2, Tier 3 cities, aspirational districts, tribal, hilly and coastal areas.

Atal New India Challenges

• AIM has launched over 24 Atal New India Challenges to create product and service innovations having national socio-economic impact.

ARISE ANIC challenges

• To promote innovation in a phased manner in the MSME/Startup sector, AIM has launched 15 ARISE-ANIC challenges along with partner Ministries.

Mentor of Change

• To enable all the initiatives to succeed AIM has launched one of the largest mentor engagement and management program “Mentor India – The Mentors of Change”.

Read current affairs for UPSC

Sharing is caring!