By : Meetanjali Sood
PRISM (Promoting innovations in individuals, start-up’s and MSME’s) is a new scheme that has been started by DSIR, Government of India to promote various activities related to entrepreneurship. The program was launched about 2 months back at Technopreneur Promotion cum Incubation Center CSIR-IHBT, Palampur to support those people of Himachal Pradesh who have technology based ideas and schemes but are not able to take these ideas to the next level either due to lack of any help from the government or there are no public agencies in the state to promote such entrepreneurial business plans.
“Our state has a handful of talent floating around but people are not ready to come forward to exhibit their innovative ideas and so our aim is to promote entrepreneurial opportunities in the most possible systematic manner. The main qualification required is matriculate and any individual from engineering, agriculture, horticulture, science, technology, housewives any women or student, is encouraged to apply. He/she should have the innovative idea and wish to translate that into working prototypes/models/processes.
The program also aims to support any Institution, Organization, Society or NGO that has been set up under the Societies Registration Act, 1860 or Indian Trusts Act, 1882 leading to development of state-of-art new technology solutions aimed at helping MSME clusters” says R.K Sood, Sr. Principal Scientist of Technopreneur Promotion cum Incubation Centre, CSIR-IHBT, Palampur.
The broad objective of PRISM is to transform technology based ideas into big ventures through support mechanisms and has been divided into two categories of PRISM-I and PRISM-II. In PRISM-I category the minimum support is limited to 2.00 lakhs or 90% of the total project cost. The maximum support cost in this category of program can be extended up to 20.00 lakhs or 90% of the total project cost. Whereas support extended in PRISM-II category is 50.00 lakhs or 50% of the total project cost.
The proposal shall be considered in sector like Green Technology, Clean Technology, Industrially Utilizable Smart Materials, Waste to Health, Affordable Healthcare, Water and Sewage management or any other technology or knowledge Intensive area.
You can read PRISM guidelines and download application forms at http://www.ihbt.res.in/PRISM/
