Union Minister of State (Independent Charge) Science & Technology; Minister of State (Independent
Charge) Earth Sciences; and MoS PMO, Personnel, Public Grievances, Pensions, Atomic Energy and Space, Dr Jitendra Singh has inaugurated an advanced 650 teraflops supercomputing facility at National Agri-Food Biotechnology Institute (NABI) at Mohali which will act as a facilitator for start-ups working in areas like telemedicine, digital health, mHealth with big data, AI, Blockchain and other technologies.
Established at a cost of Rs. 20 crores, it will cater to the needs of the interdisciplinary cutting-edge research being carried out at the Institute related to agricultural and nutritional biotechnology, and help analyse big data accruing from the large-scale genomics, functional genomics, structural genomics, and population studies being carried out at various Institutes and universities of national and international repute.
It will be available to the scientists of NABI and Centre of Innovative and Applied Bioprocessing (CIAB) and will be open to collaborative work for the scientists/faculties working in the neighbouring institutes/universities and for the projects sanctioned under the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM). It has been set up in collaboration with C-DAC, Pune.
Following the inauguration, Dr. Jitendra Singh launched two digital working platforms – NABI-Labify and e-Office at NABI & CIAB under the ‘Digital India’ Initiative.
NABI Labify is unique software that facilitates live tracking of funds, which are sanctioned for the purchase of equipment, consumables, manpower, and extramural projects.
The Minister announced that the Government will identify and promote 75 innovative Start-Ups in the 75th year of India’s independence and the new supercomputing facility will act as a facilitator for them.
In another event, Dr Jitendra Singh inaugurated i-RISE, a technology business incubator (TBI) at Mohali that proposes to provide world-class research facilities for start-ups in the country. With this, Mohali will join the league of other Start-up hubs in the country like Bengaluru and Gurugram. The Minister hoped that TBI will become successful and end up becoming a unicorn start-up, adding to the ever-growing list of Unicorn start-ups from India. Currently, India has 51 unicorn startups, the third highest in the world, he added.
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Dr Jitendra Singh said that due to various schemes, focus, and support systems provided by Prime Minister, Mr. Narendra Modi, 10,000 start-ups got registered in India in 2021 alone and the country now had 50,000 plus start-ups providing more than 2 lakh jobs in the country.
He said that supported by the Department of Science and Technology and Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, IISER Mohali, i-RISE Incubator will work to transform and build deep impact across the start-up ecosystem in the region, through innovation, knowledge, and technology adoption.
He informed that in the last over seven years, India has been consistently rising in the global start-up ecosystem and now had 500 plus incubator networks supporting innovation and entrepreneurship across the nation. He noted said that in terms of the number of technology-based start-ups, the ranking of India was just next to US and India has jumped to 46th rank in the Global Innovation Index.
