Kochi-type Start-up Village at Vizag?

A high-level team led by IT Advisor to visit Kerala. While Visakhapatnam is the preferred destination for the proposed Startup Village, other coastal places are also on the radar, he indicated.

Andhra Pradesh will soon have its own Start-up Village for IT companies on the lines of the one set up in Kochi, Kerala.

A team of officials from the State led by J. Satyanarayana, IT Advisor to the State Government, will visit Kochi on Friday for a firsthand understanding of the Start-up Village established there. “They have created an innovative ecosystem and several hundred companies have come up. We want to see how they did it and what it takes to do a similar thing here”, Mr. Satyanarayana told The Hindu here on Wednesday.

While Visakhapatnam is the preferred destination for the proposed Startup Village, other coastal places are also on the radar, he indicated. An assessment would be done after the team returned from Kerala which has launched the project to attract 1000 technology start-ups in the next 10 years.

He said the IT policy would be geared up to attract more investments, entrepreneurs and start-ups. In all, a set of 18 policies, including one on hardware, have been formulated and would be soon placed before the State Cabinet for approval. Once the policies get crystallised, all-out promotion of Andhra Pradesh would be taken up to convince investors in India and abroad, particularly in the United States and Japan for software sector and Taiwan and South Korea for hardware.

IT exports

The contribution of new State to IT exports was expected to be only 0.25 per cent and the thrust of the IT policy would be to increase it by 20 times and make it five per cent in the next five to six years. While Visakhapatnam would be the mega IT destination, IT Parks would also be coming up Kakinada, Anantapur, Chittoor and Vijayawada. Each of them would be groomed into an important IT centre.

Mr. Satyanarayana said an Innovation Fund would be created as funding startups would be one of the important policy initiatives.

According to a blueprint put up on Andhra Pradesh Government’s website by IT and Communications Separtment, the goal is to achieve IT investments worth $2 billion by 2017 and $ 5 billion by 2020. Similarly, the State aims to attract $ 5 billion investments in electronics manufacturing by 2017 and $10 billion by 2020. On broadband penetration, it seeks to provide gigabit connectivity to all gram panchayats by 2017 and to all villages by 2020.