Atal Innovation Mission (AIM) including Self-Employment and Talent Utilization (SETU) is Government of India’s endeavour to promote a culture of innovation and entrepreneurship. Its objective is to serve as a platform for promotion of world-class Innovation Hubs, Grand Challenges, Start-up businesses and other self-employment activities, particularly in technology driven areas.
The Atal Innovation Mission shall have two core functions:
- Entrepreneurship promotion through Self-Employment and Talent Utilization, wherein innovators would be supported and mentored to become successful entrepreneurs
- Innovation promotion: to provide a platform where innovative ideas are generated
Initiatives under AIM
- Atal Tinkering Laboratories: With a vision to ‘Cultivate one Million children in India as Neoteric Innovators’, Atal Innovation Mission is establishing Atal Tinkering Laboratories (ATLs) in schools across India. The objective of this scheme is to foster curiosity, creativity and imagination in young minds; and inculcate skills such as design mindset, computational thinking, adaptive learning, physical computing etc. AIM will provide grant-in-aid that includes a one-time establishment cost of Rs. 10 lakh and operational expenses of Rs. 10 lakh for a maximum period of 5 years to each ATL
- Atal Incubation Centres: AIM intends to support the establishment of new incubation centres called Atal Incubation Centres (AICs) that would nurture innovative start-up businesses in their pursuit to become scalable and sustainable enterprises. The AICs would create world class incubation facilities across various parts of India with suitable physical infrastructure in terms of capital equipment and operating facilities, coupled with the availability of sectoral experts for mentoring the start-ups, business planning support, access to seed capital, industry partners, trainings and other relevant components required for encouraging innovative start-ups. AIM will provide a grant-in-aid of upto Rs. 10 crore for a maximum period of 5 years to cover the capital and operational expenditures to establish the AIC.
- Scale-up Support to Established Incubation Centres: AIM envisages to augment capacity of the Established Incubation Centres in the country. It will provide financial scale-up support to enable Established Incubation Centres. The scheme would radically transform the start-up ecosystem in the country by upgrading the Established Incubation Centres to world-class standards.
News Related to Atal Innovation Mission
- Atal Innovation Mission (AIM), NITI Aayog has signed an agreement with Dassault Systemes Fondation to jointly work towards providing a digitally rich ecosystem of Innovation in India and promoting STEM based innovation and entrepreneurship among aspiring young minds across the country.
- Atal Innovation Mission, NITI Aayog and All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), Ministry of Education’s Innovation Cell announced their strategic collaboration to empower Atal Tinkering Lab school students for world class future ready innovation skills across the country.The partnership offers to begin with to connect around 7200+ Atal Tinkering Labs (ATLs) established in schools with 2500+ Institution’s Innovation Councils (IICs) functioning in higher educational institutions spread across all the states and UTs.