Indian Colleges are turning into breeding grounds for Startups!

Year 2014, the change in regime at the center in India, a fresh and new energetic government taking charge, well backed by the large corporates primarily hailing from Gujrat, the Businessmen’s state of India clearly identified the huge problem of unemployment that could never be conquered by government offices and existing private sector companies offering them employment.

This humungous problem can be toppled only by creating a breed of entrepreneurs in every nook and corner of the country launching startups like mushrooms all over and generating huge employment and taking the burden off shoulder from the government and few corporate companies. The government baked all its machinery in support of the ideas coming up through this program and started funding these ideas at every stage of their development.

India needed manufacturing as a major sector taking up the baton of employment and therefore to promote more and more emerging new manufacturing companies the government quickly launched Make in India scheme encouraging more and more manufacturing units in the country producing everything to export. 

These initiatives of the Modi Government has started giving results and the tiny spark from the top universities and best colleges of the country has now started reaching the smaller towns and underserved areas of all the states. The regional and small private colleges are ready to partner with all service providers to see startups budding out from their own students and they are highly motivated and interested to join the ever-growing demand and craze of college startups.

We visited several colleges in the districts of Aligarh, Mathura, Bulandshahr, Kasgunj and Hathras etc. in U.P. and found a common urge in the small and regional colleges to join the bandwagon as early as possible, few of them have already started working on the idea of setting up their own Incubation centers within their college premise and start doing something on their own. Others are under the idea phase but everybody is to some extent into the process.

All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), a national-level Apex Advisory Body to conduct a survey on the facilities available for technical education and to promote development in the country in a coordinated and integrated manner, is pushing the idea of setting up Incubation centers in all technical colleges across India. This initiative is spreading like wildfire and the technical colleges are picking up fast on track.

Two of the colleges in Mathura District has already setup their incubation centres within the campus and one has already registered over 50 startups as incorporation under ministry of corporate affairs. 

Entrepreneurship Cell, in these Universities are non-profit, strategically innovated, value-driven setup with the prime focus on impacting young minds and is run by the student entrepreneurs in making.

Polaris Educational and Cultural Trust, through its initiative Polaris Incubation Center is helping dozens of colleges work in the direction of change in thought process among the youth from job oriented mindset to business oriented evolved mindset in their college days to halp the vision of the government as well as help the country grow.

Creative approach to Incubation

PIC has strategically place itself in the center of these colleges, the home of Raja Mahendra Pratap State University and prestigious Aligarh Muslim University to help these regional and private colleges associated with RMPS University to get benefitted from a single incubation center in the area supporting multiple colleges and large number of projects.

PIC is acting as a nodal body to help all these colleges collaborate and solve their entrepreneurship hurdles through cross campus collaboration.

The ambitious girls from a regional girls college in Aligarh wants to setup a startup in social entrepreneurship sector with their skills, but do not have any technical support or understanding to take their products to the world, nor they have management skills to setup and run their business professionally and be a part of the growth engine of the country. PIC can help these girls find another girl from some other technical college looking forward to work in social sector and also find another girl from some management college to help them in setting up and run the business. This will form a solid team, three girls from three different colleges, on the same platform, one with idea, other with technical skills to showcase it and the third with management skills to present and run the show. An investors delight, looking at such a dedicated and diversified team with seriousness and energy, the angel investors opens up their pocket and fund, not the idea, but the team.

While talking to investors and VCs we found that most of them are interested in the results and results are a by-product of seriousness of the team and the skillset those comes from the diversity of the team. PIC’s cross campus collaboration mission is something that is going to change the course of the game of entrepreneurship for those who are starting with little or no funds and cannot pay even for running social media promotion or a website.

The colleges are joining in by simply signing an MOU with PIC for them to be on the same page and keep the vision of PIC to have a startup in every college, in the center, the colleges are also asked to sign an NDA to ensure the security and integrity of the idea, as it grows into a business.

PIC is helping the students understand the concept, knows the pitfalls and take guidance through lectures, workshops, events and collaborations.

We hope to see a large number of startups coming out from these small and regional colleges soon with the help of these kind of initiatives and support from the government.