EDII To Support 7,000 Youths Across 40 Districts In Starting Up

The Government of India has taken a step forward to encourage youths on setting up micro-small innovation-led enterprises through training in the Indian startup ecosystem.

The government officials have appointed Entrepreneurship Development Institute of India (EDII) as the pan India national implementing agency to facilitate entrepreneurship sensitisation under the title, ‘Sustainable Development through Science and Technology Lead Entrepreneurship in 40 Aspirational Districts’.

The move envisages to train over 7,000 youths spread across 40 districts (up to three in each state) in 28 states (except Goa) across India who have urged to set up small innovative startup — supported by the National Science and Technology Entrepreneurship Development Board (NSTEDB) under the Department of Science and Technology (DST).

The three entrepreneurship programmes will be convened from May-end in these 40 districts with around 60 participants each, for a period of nine months.

The project aims at providing knowledge and information about the benefits of entrepreneurship, financial assistance, incentives and subsidies available from the government for different segments of the society towards enterprise creation.

Before conducting the training programme, EDII has also decided to undertake Area Potential Survey or Baseline Survey in all these 40 districts.

Speaking to Inc42, EDII DST-NIMAT-Project Director and Member Secretary SB Sareen said, “The idea to take the survey is to understand what exactly the ground realities are: what are the resources available; its population strength; education, literacy status; what kind of support or mechanism and banking structure are required; and what kind of business opportunities can be promoted.”

He added that the survey will give the team a thorough insight as far as requirements in these districts are concerned. “It will give us a lead as to what kind of businesses have potentials in these districts because the same kind of industries cannot be implemented in all the 40 districts as it depends on the expertise, investment capacity, etc,” he added.

EDII –which acts as a catalyst in facilitating entrepreneurs and help them transition from the existing SMEs into growth-oriented enterprises through entrepreneurship – in the last five years has generated employment for over 60K people in the Science and Technology field and trained over five lakh youth towards entrepreneurship between 2013 and 2018.

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