National Missions

Atal Innovation Mission (AIM) including Self-Employment and Talent Utilization (SETU) is Government of India’s endeavour to promote a culture of innovation and entrepreneurship. It shall act as a platform for promotion of world-class Innovation Hubs, Grand Challenges, Start-up businesses and other self-employment activities, particularly in technology driven areas.

AIM shall have two core functions: Entrepreneurship promotion through Self-Employment and Talent Utilization, wherein innovators would be supported and mentored to become successful entrepreneurs and Innovation promotion: to provide a platform where innovative ideas are generated.

i) Atal Tinkering Laboratories (ATL)

With a vision to ‘Cultivate one Million children in India as Neoteric Innovators’, AIM is establishing Atal Tinkering Laboratories (ATLs) in schools across India. This shall greatly help in fostering curiosity, creativity and imagination in young minds; and inculcate skills such as design mindset, computational thinking, adaptive learning, physical computing etc.
Through ATL, young children will get a chance to work with tools and equipment to  better understand the concepts of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics). ATL would contain educational and learning ‘do it yourself’ kits and equipment on – science, electronics, robotics, open source microcontroller boards, sensors and 3D printers and computers. 
In order to foster inventiveness among students, different activities ranging from regional/ national level competitions, exhibitions, workshops on problem solving, designing and fabrication of products, lecture series etc. may be conducted at periodic intervals.

ii) Atal Incubation Centres (AIC)

One of the objectives of AIM is to support the establishment of new incubation centres called Atal Incubation Centres (AICs) that would nurture innovative start-up businesses in their pursuit to become scalable and sustainable enterprises. 

The AICs would facilitate the creation of world class incubation facilities across various parts of India with state-of-the-art infrastructure in terms of capital equipment and operating facilities, along with the availability of sectoral experts for mentoring the start-ups, business planning support, access to seed capital, industry partners, trainings etc. Moreover, AICs would be established in subject specific areas such as manufacturing, transport, energy, health, education, agriculture, water and sanitation etc. 

iii) Scale-up Support to Established Incubation Centres

This scheme envisages to augment the capacity of the Established Incubation Centres in our country. It aims to radically transform the start-up ecosystem in the country by upgrading the Established Incubation Centres to world-class standards by providing financial scale-up support and other such requirements.