Maharashtra Startup Week
Challenges
Maharashtra is a heavily populated state in India, and faces several critical environmental issues. Particularly, the state has to deal with huge amounts of wastes that are generated during their religious festivals. It becomes very difficult for the Government to provide solutions for waste reduction on its own. In September 2018, while Maharashtra was dealing with the huge amount of waste generated during their religious celebrations, a Mumbai-based startup quietly worked with the Pimpri-Chinchwad Municipal Corporation and collected 1.72 tons of floating waste. Inspired by the result, The Maharashtra State Innovation Society created an initiative to fight their Environmental Challenges.
Towards a Solution
The Maharashtra State Innovation Society organizes the Maharashtra Startup Week in an effort to encourage, engage and enable the state’s entrepreneurial ecosystem. It provides startups with a platform to showcase their innovative solutions to the Government of Maharashtra.
Startups from sectors such as education, skilling, healthcare, agriculture, clean energy, environment, water and waste management, smart infrastructure and mobility, governance and miscellaneous are invited to submit their applications.
With the help of multiple ecosystem partners and judges, the top 100 startups are selected to present their solutions to an esteemed panel of judges comprising representatives from the government, industry, academia and investors. During the weeklong event, startups from each sector make their pitch to a panel consisting of senior government officials, industry experts, academicians, and corporate partners.
The best 24 are selected as winners. Winners receive work orders of up to Rs 15 lakh from the Maharashtra State Innovation Society to pilot their solutions within different state departments. Subsequently, the startups receive support in terms of access to government machinery and mentoring from its institutional partners for a period of up to 12 months to deploy their solutions on the ground.
The participating startups also get access to multiple other benefits such as cloud credits, access to multiple events, connect with ecosystem players such as mentors, investors, etc.
One of the biggest highlights of the event is a panel discussion on ‘Making Maharashtra More Attractive For Startups: Roadmap To The Future’. The panel discusses how the environment in the state can be made more cohesive and collaborative for startups and the measures that could be taken by the government in terms of policies and initiatives to support the growth of startups.
The Maharashtra Startup Week has accorded startups with loads of traction and much-needed opportunities, was a massive success in its second run as well. The Maharashtra Startup Week encourages and brings to the fore startups with a view to strengthen the state’s entrepreneurial ecosystem. It also aims to carve out an important role for the startup ecosystem in socially relevant activities and in the state’s socio-economic development.
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