Context: Recently, Atal Innovation Mission launched the phase 1 of the 2nd edition of the Atal New India Challenge (ANIC 2.0)
Atal New India Challenge (ANIC) 2.0

• It is a flagship program of Atal Innovation Mission, NITI Aayog.
• Aim: To seek, select, support and nurture technology-based innovations that solve sectoral challenges of national importance and societal relevance.

Objectives

• Help create products from existing technologies that solve problems of national importance and societal relevance.
• Help new solutions find markets and early customers (commercialization) in the context of India

Key Functions

• It will incentivize innovations in areas critical to India’s development and growth.

The areas include: education, health, water and sanitation, agriculture, food processing, housing, etc.

• It will support innovators to scale over the risks associated with access to resources for testing, piloting and market creation.
• ANIC supports the selected start-ups through to the commercialization stage over a course of 12 – 18 months.

ANIC concentrates on 18 challenges from 7 sectors: E-mobility; Road Transportation; Space Technology and Applications; Medical Devices and Equipment; Sanitation; Waste Management and Agriculture.

ANIC 1.0

• It followed an open innovation challenge format where challenge statements were put in the public domain and a call for application was done.
• The received applications moved through 3 rounds of evaluations before a technical screening and selection committee (SSC).
• The winner start-ups / individual innovators are supported through a tranche-based grant-in-aid of up to INR 1 crore.
• The support is to take the prototype to commercialization stage in a total duration of the 12-18 months.

Key highlights
ANIC was launched in partnership with 5 ministries

1. Ministry of Jal Shakti
2. Ministry of Railways
3. Ministry of Agriculture and FW
4. Ministry of Road Transport & Highways
5. Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs

It focused across 24 challenge areas some of them are:

• Climate-smart Agriculture
• Fog vision system for road and rail
• Systems to predict identify and recognize rail failure using technologies
• Predictive Maintenance of Rolling Stock
• Alternate fuel-based transportation
• Smart Mobility
• Electric Mobility
• Safe transport