Biotech incubation centre at UAS in Dharwad

New Delhi: Jan 23, 2014 DHNS

The University of Agricultural Sciences in Dharwad is one of the five state varsities that will be funded by the Centre to set up a biotechnology incubation centre where students will be encouraged to form start-up ventures and solve industrial problems.

Anna University, Chennai; Punjab University, Chandigarh; Tamil Nadu Agriculture University, Coimbatore and University of Rajasthan, Jaipur are the other four universities that will receive monetary aid from the Biotechnology Industry Research Assistance Council (BIRAC) and National Innovation Council, headed by Sam Pitroda.

Seed money

“Each university would receive Rs 1.5 crore-Rs 2 crore as the seed money to set up the centre and provide a monthly fellowship of Rs 50,000 for a PhD student and Rs 25,000 for a MSc student. The scheme will be in operation for three years at the moment,” Renu Swarup, Managing Director of BIRAC told Deccan Herald.

The university will share its infrastructure and resources to set up these centres, where commercially attractive ideas will be nurtured and scaled up to the industrial level.

“The industry, when it comes on board, can top up the fellowship as well as the research grant,” she said.

The UAS, Dharwad will focus on developing agriculture products.

25 universities

“In the next three years, we plan to expand the incubation facility in as many as 25 universities,” said K Vijayraghavan, Secretary in the Department of Biotechnology.

Indian Institutes of Technology and Indian Institute of Sciences, Bangalore have incubation facility to encourage post-graduate and post doctoral students to take up entrepreneurship. But most of the state universities are deprived of these centres.