Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Amazon Internet Services Pvt. Ltd (AISPL) conducts the resale and marketing of Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud service in India.
The MoU is aimed at promoting technology innovation and the sustainable growth of startups in India. The MoU comes after the ministry launched the SAMRIDH program to support 300 IT startups.
Under the new collaboration, AWS works together with MeitY Startup Hub to identify startups with deep technology capabilities and enable them to build impactful solutions to address some of the biggest problems facing society in India.
“MeitY Startup Hub is excited to collaborate with AWS to help startups further accelerate, scale, and build innovative solutions. Mentoring, technical expertise, cloud credits, skill enhancement programming, and other resources provided under this collaboration will be of significant value for startups,” said Jeet Vijay, chief executive officer, MeitY Startup Hub.
How would it function?
MeitY Startup Hub will facilitate and organize government-backed innovation challenges to help startups in the public sector scale their solutions. Moreover, the collaboration will mobilize startups and the community of incubators and accelerators to curate and run startup acceleration programs with AWS.
Initially, the collaboration will focus on startups addressing healthcare, agriculture, public safety, transportation, smart cities and citizen engagement. Identified startups will be able to leverage AWS’s depth and breadth of services in the cloud, internet of things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), data analytics, and security, among others.
Rahul Sharma, President (Public Sector) AISPL, AWS India and South Asia, said the combination of India’s scale, its thriving technology community, and public sector willingness to adopt new technologies to address societal challenges is a great opportunity for startups to create impactful innovations.
“MeitY’s focused efforts supporting startups operating in social impact areas and building a collaborative innovation ecosystem is commendable, and we are proud to collaborate with the MeitY Startup Hub towards this goal,” he added.
