Anand (Gujarat): To assist and nurture the entrepreneurs striving hard to serve the rural sector, the Institute of Rural Management, Anand (IRMA), one of the premier institutes in rural management in India, will launch an Incubator center next month which will focus on agriculture and allied enterprises.

The Incubator will work around three verticals: agriculture and small agribusiness, sustainable habitats and sanitation, and servicing rural India covering rural tourism, clean energy, education, and ICT.

Director of IRMA Professor Jeemol Unni today said that the incubator to be set up via one of IRMA’s
Centres of Excellence, the Centre for Social Entrepreneurship and Enterprises (CSEE), on August 22-23 would be accomplished with the help of a national conference to be held here.

The Department of Science and Technology (DST), Government of India, under its Innovation-Science and Technology Entrepreneurship Development (i-STED) programme has recently approved a five year Rs 2.89 crore grant to IRMA, which will enable the institute to identify and support social entrepreneurs and enterprises focused on rural and social innovations. This would encourage and help students to think and act in the direction of rural entrepreneurship.

IRMA’s incubator will initially focus on agriculture and allied enterprises as part of the Institute’s mission and leadership in promoting sustainable, ecologically-friendly, and equitable socio-economic development of rural people through professional management.

The incubator will leverage IRMA’s alumni network comprising of leaders in rural, collective, and social CSEE will extend its experience on entrepreneurship development through its ongoing and
completed research projects and initiatives of the Centre. These include the British Council supported collaborative project on “Seeding Social Innovation and Enterprise in Universities” with The Hive, Nottingham Trent University, UK and UnLtd, UK as partners, the ICSSR supported project entitled “The Emerging Role of Women Entrepreneurs in the New Indian Middle Class”, the ICAR project on “Behavioral Analysis of Farmers Decision Making on Agricultural Innovations” and “Rural and Agricultural Mechanization in Odisha” funded by CIMMYT, the International Maize and Wheat Centre, she said.

The fledgling or underdevelopment CSEE Incubator currently has three Incubatees: its recent alumni who have started their own ventures, Dhwani Rural Information Sytems, i-Saksham and Tallbird working on deploying ICT-based tools for rural development, education, and skilling India initiatives. The Incubator will work with IRMA’s Social Entrepreneurship Cell, an active student body, and enable students to pursue entrepreneurship by enabling them to be part of, and learn from, a peer network and mentoring ecosystem of both early stage start-ups and mature social enterprises engaged with the Centre.

CSEE is currently associated with ten social enterprises that have proof of concept and are ready to scale.

The Incubator is expected to build an entrepreneurial ecosystem by providing mentoring and networking support, collaborative research, entrepreneurship training and capacity building to its partners and incubatees. This will enable entrepreneurs to convert promising ideas into business models through skill enhancement, capacity building, and better outreach, She said.

DeshGujarat