Indian govt, Amazon partner to ramp up startup innovation

The MeitY Startup Hub, an initiative of the Indian government’s Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY) has entered into a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Amazon Internet Services, according to a statement from the e-commerce giant on Friday.

Amazon Internet Services undertakes the resale and marketing of Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud services in India.

With this partnership, MeitY Startup Hub and AWS aim to identify startups with deep technology capabilities and enable and empower them to build impactful solutions to address the biggest problems facing society in India, the statement said.

“Mentoring, technical expertise, cloud credits, skill enhancement programming, and other resources provided under this collaboration will be of significant value for startups,” Jeet Vijay, CEO, MeitY Startup Hub, said.

Through the AWS Startup Ramp program, startups will gain access to AWS Credits, a community of experts, technical training and support covering cloud architecture, cost optimization, security, and scalability readiness.

The MeitY Startup Hub on the other hand will facilitate and organise government-backed innovation challenges to help startups focused on the public sector scale their solutions.

“Mentoring, technical expertise, cloud credits, skill enhancement programming, and other resources provided under this collaboration will be of significant value for startups,” Jeet Vijay, CEO, MeitY Startup Hub, said.

The collaboration will also mobilise startups, and the community of incubators and accelerators to curate and run startup acceleration programs with AWS, the statement added.

For starters, the initiative will focus on startups addressing healthcare, agriculture, public safety, transportation, smart cities and citizen engagement.

“The combination of India’s scale, its thriving technology community and public sector willingness to adopt new technologies to address challenges in society, is a great opportunity for startups to create impactful innovations,” Rahul Sharma, president, Public Sector, Amazon Internet Services and AWS India and South Asia, said.