Bhubaneswar, Apr 6 (FN Bureau) India has become the third largest start-up economy in the world, ranked behind the USA and China , Executive Chairman of Start-up Odisha Dr. Omkar Rai, said on Saturday. It was time for students to evince greater interest in start-ups to become self-dependent and position themselves as job providers instead of seeking employment themselves, Dr. Rai said while speaking at the inauguration of the ‘SOA E-Summit-2024’ at the Siksha ‘O’ Anusandhan Deemed to be University (SOA) here. The start-ups had been creating enormous opportunities for students who could make their initiatives profit-oriented with less investment, he said while expressing happiness over SOA laying emphasis on nurturing Incubation Centres. The event was organised at the Institute of Technical Education and Research (ITER), SOA’s faculty of engineering and technology, by the Atal Incubation Centre-SOA Foundation and Centre for Innovation and Incubation (SOA-CII) jointly.
Dr. Rai said that Odisha had 1940 recognised start-ups, which included 151 in the agricultural sector, 25 in Artificial Intelligence, 27 in automotive, 13 in telecommunication and networking, 133 in the education sector, 2 in conventional energy and 22 in renewable energy. Dr. Rai also inaugurated a start-up expo and 24-hour idea prototype hackathon on the occasion. Speaking on the occasion, SOA Vice-Chancellor Prof. Pradipta Kumar Nanda said that the university had organised such an E-Summit for the first time. The Atal Incubation Centre in SOA would soon come into prominence, he said, adding that the university was laying stress on innovation not only in engineering and technology but in other curriculum as well. Prof. Nanda said that recently IIT-Hyderabad praised two projects of SOA, one of which belonged to the agricultural sector and the other pertained to dental sciences.