Atal Innovation Mission of NITI Aayog launches Women-Centric Challenges to foster New Ideas

In order to encourage innovation and entrepreneurship in the nation, NITI Aayog's Atal Innovation Mission (AIM) announced the beginning of women-centric challenges as part of phase-II of the second iteration of the Atal New India Challenge (ANIC). ANIC stated that it intends to find, choose, support, and foster technology-based innovations through a grant of up to Rs 1 crore that address sectoral challenges of national significance and societal relevance.

The major problems that women from all walks of life encounter are addressed by ANIC's Woman Centric Challenges. These include advancing women's hygiene through innovation, advancing women's safety through innovation, providing professional networking opportunities for women, improving the lives of working mothers through innovation, and easing the lives of rural women, according to a statement from NITI Aayog.

Women-centric concerns are thought-provoking and can result in significant breakthroughs and solutions, according to Parmeswaran Iyer, CEO of NITI Aayog. The challenges' introduction, according to AIM's Mission Director Chintan Vaishnav, is in accordance with Prime Minister Narendra Modi's goal of enabling women and girls to reach their full potential. “These challenges crafted ANIC to address the major issues faced by women from all spheres of life. I encourage innovators to apply for this noble initiative at the earliest,” he added. 

AIM collaborated with the Indo-German development cooperation project Economic Empowerment of Women Entrepreneurs and Start-ups by Women (Her&Now) in March of this year, among other initiatives to encourage women's entrepreneurship.

The project, which aims to equip AIM business incubators with the knowledge, resources, and strategies to support women entrepreneurs, was commissioned by Germany's Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) and jointly carried out by Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH and the Ministry for Skill Development and Entrepreneurship.

Additionally, NITI Aayog presently oversees the Women Entrepreneurship Platform (WEP), which was established in 2018 to support women in starting their own firms, scaling up their inventions, and developing viable, long-term business plans. According to a statement by NITI Aayog, as of March 20, 2022, over 900 women entrepreneurs had benefited from 77 programmes and events held on the platform.