HYDERABAD: Telangana, the start-up state, offers a sea of opportunities to entrepreneurs and it does not want innovation and entrepreneurship to be confined to the capital city but spread to other major cities and towns.
Speaking at a seminar on ‘40 under 40: South India’s most vibrant young entrepreneurs’, conducted by The New Indian Express on Saturday, Minister for IT, industries, municipal administration and urban development KT Rama Rao said, “We don’t want innovation to be confined to Hyderabad and are taking up programmes in a sandbox approach to promote innovation in Tier-II and Tier-III cities. The young rural people have more pain points and can think out of box more than the city-bred youth. The order of the day is social innovation and rural innovation. Telangana government is supporting social and rural innovators.”
The state government has planned IT hubs at Nizamabad, Khammam, Karimnagar and Warangal by investing `25 crore on each to spur IT-based economy in districts. It is apart from mixed IT and industrial parks planned in Mahbubnagar and Nalgonda districts.
“It is known that 90 to 95 pc of the startups fail and do not survive. But the remaining, which find success and, depending on where they are incorporated, they will create the next wave of employment. The world’s top companies and largest industries cannot cumulatively generate enough jobs. This was pointed out by former Cisco chairman John Chambers on his visit to Hyderabad for Global Entrepreneurship Summit last year, and also by established entrepreneurs and industrialists. The biggest challenge to any government or head of state is employment generation. One of the issues that dominated the Telangana movement was unemployment. The government can only fill a few hundred thousand jobs.”
About incubation space in Hyderabad, Rao said the city had the largest number of co-working spaces funded by Union government’s department of science and technology.The second phase of T-hub startup incubator of state, will be up and running in the next two years. The goal is to create at least 1 million square feet of incubation space in Hyderabad in three to four years and that would be purely in government sector, he pointed out.
To a question whether he finds it difficult to handle his Twitter account, the minister said, “Can somebody in this room help? I have a problem in filtering out hundreds of comments/tweets I get everyday, some of which are also very abusive. The problem is with picking, identifying, prioritising and coming out with response to questions that warrant immediate reply from a minister.”He was not left disappointed as a young entrepreneur rushed in from the crowd to offer help, following which he directed her to Dileep Konatham, director, digital media, IT&ES department.
Digitown, a township for techies
Hyderabad: Software professionals in the city and members of an IT welfare organisation came together to create an exclusive residential township, Digitown. The township will boast of a common workspace to aid software professionals and have amenities that would aid their work culture. Located at Thimmapur, the 33-acre land has 200 plots. “The township will have underground electricity lines besides a common workspace for 50 people and a town hall for holding meetings. It will also aid those who frequently travel to Bangalore or fly from the Shamshabad international airport as it is located by the highway,” said M Sundeep Kumar, founder of Telangana IT Association.