With Prime Minister Narendra Modi having announced the initiative “Start-Up India Stand-Up India” for boosting home-grown innovations in his Independence Day speech this year, a high-level panel formed earlier in April this year by Niti Aayog to recommend ways to promote such measures has suggested that the government should award up to 12 grand prizes for entrepreneurs coming up with out-of-the-box ideas. The prize money should be in the range of Rs 10 crores to Rs 30 crores, it has suggested.
The panel headed by Prof. Tarun Khanna of Harvard Business School, which was formed to suggest the contours of Atal Innovation Mission announced by finance minister Arun Jaitley in this year’s budget with a Rs 150 crores corpus, has submitted its detailed report where it has said that AIM’s budget should be used entirely to award up to 12 grand prizes annually for innovations.
Further it has recommended that the AIM should seek input from the appropriate ministries, including the ministry of science and technology to vet the decision to run specific Grand Challenges.
The AIM should also consider setting aside part of the prize money to place orders for the products and services that are generated by winners, the panel said in its report, which was given to the Aayog recently.
As far as the AIM itself is concerned, the panel has said that it should be conceived as a self-sustaining organisation that will facilitate growth and development of an innovation eco-system through policy advocacy and, in select cases, offer active implementation support.
The Khanna panel has said that the AIM should be an eight-member body headed by vice chairman of Niti Aayog, Mr Arvind Panagariya, and should have secretaries of ministries like skill development, industry & commerce, IT, finance, science & technology, department of industrial policy and promotion as well as agriculture, as directors.
However only four of these directors should have voting rights, the panel has recommended.
Also four independent directors should be chosen from outside the government to serve on the board of the AIM. Each of these directors would have voting rights. With this structure in place, private and public sector directors would have an equal number of votes, the Khanna panel has suggested.
The mission, it said, should also provide support for scaling up of solutions based on proven and promising innovations. Also institutional support should be given to such initiatives either through direct funding or through other models.
The panel further added that the AIM should establish itself as an apex governance body regarding co-ordination of innovation agenda being executed through different elements of the eco-system.
Among other recommendations, the Khanna panel has suggested introducing incentives to encourage entrepreneurship, roping in corporates to fund R&D, enhancing efficiency and scope of incubators and fostering a culture of innovation at the national level.
