Noted socio-technologist –1--has been appointed the mission director of Atal Innovation Mission (AIM).

So far, AIM has established 72, 59 Atal Tinkering Labs in schools across 650 districts, providing over 3.5 million students access to emerging technologies. It has also operationalised 68 Atal incubators, fostering over 2000 start-ups, of which 625 are led by women. AIM selected 56 Atal New India and ARISE Challenge winners for product innovations with socio-economic impact, and initiated establishment of 20 Atal Community Innovation Centres to spur community-centric innovations addressing needs of rural India.

It has established one of the largest voluntary Mentors of Change networks, with over 5,000 mentors nationwide and more than 30 corporate and international partners. It has also established strategic collaborations with other stakeholders to support its initiatives.

Promoting entrepreneurship in universities and industry. At the university, NGO, SME and Corporate industry levels, AIM is setting up world-class Atal Incubators (AICs) that would trigger and enable successful growth of sustainable start-ups in every sector /state of the country, thereby promoting entrepreneurs and job creators in the country addressing both commercial and social entrepreneurship opportunities in India and applicable globally.

AIM is also providing scale up support to existing incubators for scaling up their operations. AIM is providing a grant of up to Rs 10 crores to successful applicants for setting up green field incubators or scaling up existing ones. The idea is that every one of the 110 named smart cities and the top 5-10 educational / industrial institutions of every state should aspire to have a world class incubator that will provide the youth / start-up communities in the universities / industries opportunity to create new start ups. Women led incubators and entrepreneurial start-ups are strongly encouraged by AIM.

Again here, the longer term approach would be to scale up with the help of other ministries / states / sectors / public sector organizations as this would be crucial to create thousands of job creators in India.