Hindustan Shipyard Limited (HSL) and Visakhapatnam Port Trust (VPT) on Wednesday pledged support to encourage the Andhra Pradesh Innovation Society (APIS) and other stakeholders in strengthening the startup ecosystem in the city.
Speaking at a discussion on industry-innovation connect organised by APIS and Industrial Scan, a fortnightly here, they welcomed the efforts to promote statrtups culture in Visakhapatnam in particular.
HSL CMD Rear Admiral (retired) L.V. Sarat Babu and VPT Deputy Chairman P.L. Haranadh said they would entrust certain jobs to startups if they convinced them on uniqueness of their products and services.
Rear Admiral Sarat Babu pointed out how they could save around ₹60 lakh by engaging a startup from Hyderabad in taking up work on a sewage treatment plant. He said that in shipbuilding sector innovation would always play a vital role in cost reduction and making the product competitive.
“Scaling up the industry to meet the Industry 4.0 requirements is the key issue and young minds involved in startups could deliver through innovative approaches,” he said, making it clear that due to financial constraints they were not in a position to fund the startups.
Underlining the importance being accorded to startups under Startup India and Digital India programmes, Mr. Harnadh said there were several opportunities for startups in the maritime sector. Everyone was in search of out-of-the box ideas and startups could pitch in to grab the opportunities being offered by various organisations.
He said the proposed free trade zone coming up in Visakhapatnam Port would give a fillip to the startup ecosystem.
Domain-specific product
In his address, M.S Rao, president and CEO of the National E-governance Division of the Union Ministry of Electronics and IT, explained about the National Policy on Software Products-2019. He said the policy was aimed aimed at nurturing as many as 10,000 tech startups including 1,000 in tier-two and tier-three cities. Establishment of 20 domain-specific Indian software product clusters, creating a talent pool for the software industry by up-skilling one million IT professionals and motivating one lakh school and college students and training 10,000 professional to provide leadership were their goals, he stated.
Mr. Rao said the government had decided to create a corpus with ₹1,000 crore for software product development and ₹5,000 crore with the target of having 100 Indian software product companies with a turnover of ₹500 crore or employing at least 200 persons.
APIS CEO Winny Patro, National Research Development Corporation deputy manager (IPR) Bijaya Kumar Sahu and Industrial Scan editor A.K. Sabharwal spoke on the occcasion.
