‘NITI Aayog receives over 5k applications for Mentor India’

Government of India’s think-tank, NITI Aayog has received a ‘fantastic response,’ with over 5,000 applications for the Mentor India Campaign, Ramanathan Ramanan, mission director, Atal Innovation Mission (AIM). He said this at an ASSOCHAM event held in New Delhi recently.

“We want this to be several, we should at least have 10,000-15,000 mentors because the country is big, schools are widely disbursed and we need people to help,” said Ramanan while addressing an ASSOCHAM National Conference on ‘Empowerment of SC, ST and women entrepreneurs.’ He also said that the link to apply for the campaign is open till September 30. “We are going to build a network of mentors across the country from every professional organisation which is capable of supporting and this is going to be one of the largest mentoring networks across the country.”

He said that under the initiative of AIM, the government is trying to build innovators of the future. “AIM has been launched by the Prime Minister to promote innovation and entrepreneurship,” he said adding that India needs to develop as a country which can create job creators not just job seekers in order to employ 1.23 billion people profitably.

Highlighting how the government is embarked on setting up world-class incubators in India of which several women-led incubators are being set up in the country, he said “We are setting up tinkering labs in schools across the country, already 1,000 schools have been set up with tinkering labs which will empower the students to learn latest technologies like 3D printing, IOT devices, miniature electronics, robotics, Wi-Fi, communication devices and so on.” He also said that government would be setting up 2,000 tinkering labs before the end of this year.