Aravind A.Narayan, Chief Executive Officer, Pure Tech India, a company incubated by the Tiruchi Regional Engineering College Science and Technology Entrepreneurship Park (TREC-STEP), has been awarded the 2010 Torch Best Entrepreneur award by the Asian Association of Business Incubation (AABI).
The award, carrying a cash prize of US $ 10,000 was presented to Mr.Narayan by Benjamin Yuan, president, AABI, at the association's annual assembly at Taipei, Taiwan on Wednesday.
The award is given by AABI, a consortium of national business incubator's associations with members from 18 nations and regions across Asia and Pacific, annually to an outstanding innovation among incubators and to promote entrepreneurial activities in the Asia Pacific region. This was the first time that an Indian incubated company has been selected for the award, according to R.M.P.Jawahar, Executive Director, TREC-STEP and Vice President, AABI.
This year 13 nominations from various incubators of the national associations of Asian countries were received.
A panel of 12 judges from 12 countries evaluated the nominations and selected Mr.Narayan for the award.
Mr.Jawahar, in a communication, said the nominations were mainly evaluated for the innovative product lines, international market leverages, future growth potentials and the capability of the entrepreneur.
Pure Tech India, a knowledge based venture, is dedicated to innovative design and manufacturing of specialty engineering equipments used for liquid pollution control.
The company has already exported the equipments to Malaysia, Singapore, Nigeria, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Kuwait, Dubai and Iraq. Currently, the equipments are being exported to Brazil and Mozambique.
The turnover of the company increased many fold in its four years of operation at TREC-STEP with more than 50 per cent of it coming from export sales.
The company also stood first in the ranking for Best Internationalization Venture of Asia.
However, since each country is eligible for only one award Mr.Narayan was dropped for this sub award category since he was selected for the main award.
With the incubation support of TREC-STEP, the company has also been awarded an innovation grant for developing another innovative product based on diffusion dialysis, for recovery and reuse of spent pickling acid and waste to wealth project for accelerated start-ups by the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research of the Union government.
Pure Tech India was awarded the ‘Best Start-up Clean Tech Company of 2009”, the National Award for Incubatees from among the Indian Incubators, an award instituted by the Indian Science and Technology Entrepreneurs' Parks and Technology Business Incubators Association, Mr.Jawahar said.
