Santosh Patnaik
Visakhapatnam: Vice President M. Venkaiah Naidu on Tuesday said fostering student entrepreneurship through innovative and out of the box programmes is extremely critical.
He said universities need to establish close linkage with industries to mentor and handhold students with novel business ideas.
Addressing the TiE Global Summit-2020 through video conferencing from Visakhapatnam, the Vice President asked the universities to set up incubation centres to tap and nurture entrepreneurial talent among youngsters.
He also appealed to corporate sector to come forward to fund and promote entrepreneurial ecosystem on university campuses.
The IndUS Entrepreneurs (TiE) is a Silicon Valley-based non-profit organisation supporting start-ups through networking and its Summit-2020 will be showcasing opportunities to get mega investments into India.
Mentioning that the youth comprise about 65 per cent of India’s population, Naidu stressed that the vast energies of the talented youth should be tapped fully and their mindset should be changed from being job-seekers to job creators.
The Vice President also wanted a special drive to be launched for promoting entrepreneurship among women. There is a huge potential for promoting women entrepreneurs in the country, he said and expressed happiness over the fact that TiE has impacted 50,000 aspiring women entrepreneurs through mentoring.
Describing India as home to world’s third largest start-up ecosystem, Naidu quoted a recent NASSCOM study that about 50 per cent of the tech start-ups are confident of reaching revenues of pre-COVID-19 level. “This certainly is optimistic news and I am sure, things would look up for all Indian start-ups in the near future”, he added.
Referring to various studies, he said that most entrepreneurial countries in the world are also the most prosperous and entrepreneurship makes people happier and more fulfilled.
Highlighting that entrepreneurship is not only about profits, Naidu said that it is also about making people’s lives better through education, health care and basic human rights.
