What Are Telangana's IT Minister KT Rao's Plans For Silicon Valley At a convention i Silicon Valley, KTR encouraged investors, startups and members of the startup ecosystem to partner with Telangana government.
By Ritu Kochar
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The development Telangana has seen over the past few years has been tremendous and in some way or another, a huge part of it is because of the state's IT Minister K T Rama Rao. And once again he has become the favourite minister of the startup ecosystem with some of the plans he revealed at Santa Clara in California on Wednesday.
K T Rao has been touring North America with some of his senior officials. Addressing a convention of investors and IT professionals hosted by The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE) the, Rama Rao dwelt at length on Telangana government's plans on investments, industries, and innovation. The meeting was attended by prominent industrialists from Silicon Valley. There, Rao invited investors, startups and members of the startup ecosystem at Silicon Valley to partner with Telangana government in mentoring and engaging with startups at the T-Hub.
What is T-Hub?
T-Hub is a unique public/private partnership between the government of Telangana, 3 of India's premier academic institutes (IIIT-H, ISB & NALSAR) and key private sector leaders. It is a place where start-up, academic, corporate, research and government sectors intersect to solve problems together.
The mission behind this is to create one of the tightest and most vibrant entrepreneur communities in the world to encourage and fuel more start-up success stories in India. For this they are attracting the best start-ups and entrepreneur organizations there are from across the world and building an extensive network to help entrepreneurs launch and scale innovative companies. Knowing that this all can only happen with education, they will equip innovators and organizations alike with the entrepreneurship skills and lastly, link and promote all entrepreneurship-related stakeholders in Hyderabad and Telangana.
Telangana government was also responsible for building the CatalysT – A T-Hub Building in Hyderabad. The largest building in the country for entrepreneurship, 70,000 square foot in length, it only matches the height these entrepreneurs long to reach. And CatalysT wishes to be that platform where the ideas of these entrepreneurs amalgamate to build world class technology.
What's Telangana Govt up to?
Now, a year after setting up T-Hub along with premier educational institutions in Hyderabad, the Telangana government is planning to set up an outpost of the T-Hub at Silicon Valley.
"We are going to set up T-Hub outpost (extension centre) in Silicon Valley. We need support and cooperation from TiE (a Global network of entrepreneurs) and investors from Silicon Valley," the minister said.
The minister vowed to make startup state to a scale-up state in the days to come with innovation, knowledge, skills and the best policies with a focus on industry and IT development and a focus on welfare and development. He said, "Leaders were temporary and institutions permanent and Telangana Government has been striving to build institutions for the last two years."
Furthermore, K T Rao discussed the salient features of Telangana ICT Policy 2016 and four other allied policies launched in April this year in his talk. He invited the Silicon Valley fraternity to partner with Telangana Government in scaling up of start-ups being incubated at T-Hub adding that an outpost to the incubator would be soon opened in the Valley. He said that business leaders of the core should tap the opportunities in the state since its manner is so transparent and offers a corrupt free and hassle free single window system of giving permissions to industries at one go. Helping the entrepreneur has been high on the government's agenda and hence, the government came up with a single window policy - TSiPASS that ensures single window clearances in 15 days for a mega project in the state - and IT policy.
The IT Minister also spoke about Telangana Academy of Skill and Knowledge (TASK) – the wing of IT E&C Department that is making Graduates industry-ready by imparting state-of-the-art skills.
According to the Minister, the state government took up digital literacy in massive scale and is moving towards m-Governance from e-Governance aiming to take the administration to the masses, said a report in PTI.
The IT Minister has become the Sanata Claus of the Telangana state slowly turning the city into the next startup hub of the country. Only last month during Tim Cook's visit, the state announced that Apple will be opening a new office in Hyderabad that will focus on the development of Maps for Apple products. Recently, big firms like Uber, Google and Amazon have rushed into the state to build their development centres.
A big support for Modi's "Make in India', Telangana own "Make in Telangana' is a hit as it provides abundant opportunities in manufacturing sector. And soon with T-Hub in Silicon valley, there will be more interchange of talent across the two countries and, of therefore, collective innovation and growth.
