About:

Atal Innovation Mission (AIM) is Government of India’s flagship initiative to create and promote a culture of innovation and entrepreneurship across the length and breadth of our country. 

• AIM’s initiatives have played an important contributory role in the advancement of India from a position of 81 in the Global Innovation Index in 2015 to a position of 48 in 2020.
• AIM has adopted a holistic approach encompassing schools, universities, research institutions, industry, MSME, NGOs, and Ministries, at district, state and national levels.

Objectives:

• AIM’s objective is to develop new programmes and policies for fostering innovation in different sectors of the economy, provide platforms and collaboration opportunities for different stakeholders, and create an umbrella structure to oversee the innovation & entrepreneurship ecosystem of the country.
• To create and promote an ecosystem of innovation and entrepreneurship across the country at school, university, research institutions, MSME and industry levels. 
• It is envisaged as an umbrella innovation organization that would play an instrumental role in alignment of innovation policies between central, state and sectoral innovation schemes.

Salient features:

• It has two core functions: 

• Entrepreneurship promotion through Self-Employment and Talent Utilization (SETU), wherein innovators would be supported and mentored to become successful entrepreneurs. 
• Innovation promotion: to provide a platform where innovative ideas are generated 

• The holistic framework includeso Atal Tinkering Labs (ATLs) where students from Class 6th to Class 12th learn innovation skills and develop ideas. 

• Atal Tinkering Marathon: The marathon puts nation-wide challenge in 6 thematic areas namely Clean Energy, Water resources, Waste management, Healthcare, Smart mobility, and Agri-tech to find out the best student innovators of India. 

• Atal Incubation Centres (AICs) & Atal Community Innovation Centers (ACIC): They will be set up at the university, NGO, SME and Corporate industry levels for promoting entrepreneurship in universities and industry.
•  Atal New India Challenges and Atal Grand Challenges – To promote technology driven innovations and product creation for social and commercial impact 
• Mentor India Campaign: It’s a strategic nation building initiative to engage leaders who can guide and mentor students. Industry, Academia, Government, Global Collaborations as a key to success. 

• Recently, under Atal Innovation Mission, NITI Aayog joined hands with NASSCOM to roll out Artificial Intelligence Modules in Indian schools to leverage the full potential of AIM’s Atal Tinkering Lab (ATL). The module contains activities, videos and experiments that enable students to work through and learn the various concepts of AI.

Major initiatives:

1. Atal Tinkering Labs-Creating problem-solving mindset across schools in India.
2. Atal Incubation Centres-Fostering world class startups in universities, instituions, private sector adding new dimensions of outcomes based scale up and monitoring to existing incubator model.
3. Atal New India Challenges-Fostering product and service innovations in the country with national socio economic impact and aligning them to the needs of various sectors/ministries/industry.
4. Atal Community Innovation Centre- To stimulate community centric innovation and ideas in the unserved /underserved regions of the country including Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities and rural India
5. ARISE-To stimulates innovation and research in the MSME industry.
6. Mentors of Change Mentor India Network – One of the largest voluntary national Mentor networks with specialists, individuals from industry and academia to support all the initiatives of the mission.
7. Building strategic Innovation partnerships with Public sector, Private Sector, Multinationals, and Global Country to Country Partnerships which include USA, UK, Germany, Russia, Singapore, Sweden, Israel, Denmark, Australia to name a few.

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