Kerala: Phase 2 startup village focus on students

Kochi: The phase two of the Startup Village will launch the digital incubator SV.CO dedicated to student startups on July 13 at Thiruvananthapuram. The launch will be held in the presence of Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan, Kris Gopalakrishnan, Infosys Co-Founder and Chief Mentor of Startup Village and Dr H. K. Mittal, Head of National S&T Entrepreneurship Development Board.

The Phase 2 will focus on creating an entrepreneurial culture amongst the country’s five million engineering students by providing them a completely digital incubation framework, ranging from application for admission to teaching, mentoring and graduation, a release said on Thursday.

India needs more than one million new jobs a month for the next 20 years to employ all its youth and these jobs would mostly come from new startups if the right environment is created.

Mr. Gopalakrishnan said students, especially from Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities, are deprived of access to best faculty and mentors from startup nerve centres like Bengaluru or Silicon Valley. “The digital transformation of the incubator would address the problem to a large extent,” he said.

The Digital Incubator, which was built over the last 12 months, has already received more than 1,000 applications from students from across Kerala and towns like Vadodara in Gujarat and Vishakhapatnam in Andhra Pradesh in its beta stage. Students interested in accessing the facility can log on to www.SV.CO/apply.