'StartInCollege' phase 2 to be launched at FICCI Global Skills Summit

India's first PPP model incubater - Startup Village is all set to launch the second phase of its flagship six-month Silicon Valley entrepreneurship programme for college students at the FICCI Global Skills Summit (GSS) starting from September 15.

The programme will be in the presence of Union Minister of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship Rajiv Pratap Rudy along with Mohandas Pai chairman - Skill Development of FICCI. 

Key objective of this programme is to provide training, mentorship and global exposure bright entrepreneurial college students.

Mohandas Pai said, “FICCI is a strong supporter of integrating entrepreneurship education with the academic curriculum to fully realise the potential of initiatives such as Startup India and Skill India.”

Pai added, “The various sessions during the Global Skills Summit will highlight the importance of such efforts and our support for the #StartInCollege programme is to enable students to start young with a mindset of becoming job creators of the future.”

In these six month of programme, top engineers participating from India will get a change to nurture their business idea, build a prototype and launch to early customers. The last week of the programme will be at the Silicon Valley in the US where internet giant Facebook will partner the official host for students, and allow them to interact with its developer teams.

Sanjay Vijayakumar, Chairman of Startup Village,  "Apple, Microsoft, Google and Facebook are such generational companies that were built by college students to signify what they wanted in the world. We want our youngsters to follow a similar path."

Students can apply for the Phase 2 admissions online at the company's website until September 30. Leading e-commerce platform Paytm is offering 30 full scholarships for the programme.

The inaugural six-month entrepreneurship course commences on January 2, 2017. The students applied for the programme will go through a coding and video task selection process and the best teams will be enrolled for the Silicon Valley Programme.

Startup Village first phase of the programme was a huge success, in which it received applications from 1,946 teams from 228 universities across 1,395 colleges in 26 states.

FICCI is the industry outreach partner for #StartInCollege and is supporting efforts to create awareness about the programme among engineering students.