GRANT ALERT: Applications Invited for Atal New India Challenge

Atal Innovation Mission (AIM) is Government of India’s flagship initiative to create and promote a culture of innovation and entrepreneurship across the length and breadth of our country. AIM’s objective is to develop new programmes and policies for fostering innovation in different sectors of the economy, provide platforms and collaboration opportunities for different stakeholders, and create an umbrella structure to oversee the innovation & entrepreneurship ecosystem of the country.

Last date of Application: 2 January 2023

Purpose:

The Atal New India Challenges initiative by Atal Innovation Mission is aimed at supporting innovators creating products based on advanced technologies in areas of national importance and social relevance through a grant based mechanism, with access to handholding, mentoring and other technical support.

Atal New India Challenge is a flagship program of Atal Innovation Mission, NITI Aayog. The program aims to seek, select, support and nurture technology-based innovations that solve sectoral challenges of national importance and societal relevance.

One of the primary goals of the ANIC program is to incentivize innovations in areas critical to India’s development and growth – Education, Health, Water and Sanitation, Agriculture, Food Processing, Housing, Energy, Mobility, Space Application etc.

Researchers have long talked of the Valleys of Death at the early stage and at the commercialization stage in taking innovations to the market.

The Atal New India Challenge aims to address the second Commercialization Valley of Death - supporting innovators scale over the risks associated with access to resources for testing, piloting and market creation.

Interventions:

Funding of up to INR 1 crore for each winner start-up / MSME

The vision of the Atal New India Challenge (ANIC) is two-fold:

1. Help create products from existing technologies that solve problems of national importance and societal relevance (productization)

2. Help new solutions find markets and early customers (commercialization) in the context of India

ANIC solicits innovations in the prototype stage and supports the selected start-ups through to the commercialization stage over a course of 12 – 18 months by funding up to INR 1 crore and other associated support from the AIM innovation ecosystem.

The current round of ANIC concentrates on 18 challenges from 5 sectors in addition to Open Innovation Challenge category:

• Open Innovation Challenge

• Drinking Water & Sanitation

• Renewable Energy & Clean Tech

• Education

• Agriculture - Millet

• Women Centric Challenges

• Post & Telegraph

Eligibility Criteria:

1. Any Indian company incorporated under the Companies Act 1956/2013, primarily a Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSME) as defined in the MSMED Act, 2006

2. Any company registered as a Start-up, as defined, and recognized by the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT), Ministry of Commerce and Industry, Government of India

3. The majority stake (more than 51%) of the applicant entity must be held in India.

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