National Innovation Council submits its report to president

The National Innovation Council (NInC) has presented its second annual ‘Report to the People’, 2012, to president of India, Pranab Mukherjee, at Rahstrapati Bhavan at the second Global Innovation Roundtable (GIR), held on November 1 and 2  in New Delhi, India. 

The NInC report outlined its activities and initiatives undertaken to strengthen the innovation ecosystem in the country in the past year. The NInC, chaired by Sam Pitroda, adviser to the prime minister, hosted the second GIR, which sets the agenda for global cooperation in innovation.

At the concluding session on ‘Collaboration on innovation’, numerous experiences, insights and ideas were shared by the participants. One of the discussions was on how existing educational content could be aggregated, filtered and indexed under the guidance of global domain experts and made available on mobile devices like Aakash.

The roundtable saw participation from heads of innovation policy from 20 governments across the world as well as leading global innovation experts.

Ministerial level representatives from countries like Europe, the US, United Kingdom, Africa, innovation experts from organisations such as Nesta, Innovation Norway, United Nations, the World Bank, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation etc, private enterprises, ministers and policy makers from the Indian government and members of the National Innovation Council, participated. 

Pitroda highlighted the Council’s commitment towards innovation in the education system. He informed that the government has created the National Knowledge Network, a high bandwidth network to connect all the educational and research institutions in India, a project that provides an unprecedented platform for leveraging ICT to launch innovation in diverse sectors. In his forward on the official site (http://innovationcouncil.gov.in), Pitroda said that the NInC is in the final stages of launching the India inclusive innovation fund to finance innovative enterprises.

“In the long term, the fund size will grow to Rs5,000 crore, but initially we will operate with Rs500 crore and the contribution for the same will come from the government, banks, financial institutions and agencies,” he said. 

Pitroda also informed that the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) will be launching 1,000 scholarships under the national innovation scholarship scheme from 2013.

He further added that the MHRD in consultation with NIC and the Planning Commission has identified institutes where five new design innovation centres will be co-located and become functional in the year 2012-13.   The prime minister constituted the NInC in September 2010, which began its work in the same year in November and presented its first year ‘Report to the People’ in November 2011.