IT dept will pitch heavily on skilling and entrepreneurship: Priyank Kharge

Bengaluru: The Budget for fiscal year 2024-25 that was announced by the Karnataka government last week gave specific focus to building a scientific temperament in the people of the state, which would further aid in propelling the state as an innovation and technology hub on a global scale. The state government has been releasing policies and announcing centres of excellence for a number of emerging technology sectors, with a specific focus on skilling, incubation and funding support for startups to build a vibrant entrepreneurial ecosystem.

A number of new such measures were announced in the Budget this year too. On the sidelines of DH’s Bengaluru 2040 Summit held on Saturday, Anjali Jain caught up with the Minister of Information Technology and Biotechnology Priyank Kharge to gain further insight into the state’s plans for the burgeoning sector and how startups from the state can be scaled to a global platform.

Edited excerpts.

Karnataka already has a thriving ecosystem for global capability centres (GCC), with over 400 operating in the state at the moment. What was the need to introduce a new GCC Policy in the budget?

Any ecosystem where we need to establish ourselves as pioneers, or to get a higher level of investor confidence, we need a policy. For instance, just because the IT sector is booming, doesn't mean we won't have a policy. A policy restores confidence in investors and shows that we are serious about this. That we care about them and whatever their needs are, whether its talent, infrastructure or whatever else they might need.

We are the fourth largest technology cluster today because of our policies. The ecosystem was always there. If they have a framework to work around with, the people and industry will come forward. They know their investments will be safe, that they have a government that is listening, and that there is a policy that will protect them.

When can we expect the GCC policy to be released?

It was announced on February 16, so it should probably be released in the next three months.

During the state Budget, three new startup programmes were also announced, namely for student or young entrepreneurs, women and agri-tech ventures. What will be the corpus for these?

We already have the Elevate corpus that is there, so overall this time the IT department has a budget of close to Rs 500 crore. This will be heavily invested in skilling and entrepreneurship.

A new Centre of Excellence for fintech, spacetech and automotive-tech to be built over the next 5 years was announced during the budget. What is the objective behind this?

All our centres of excellence do three important things. They nurture talent, leadership and research, leading to innovations, which leads to startups being built. Startups will not happen overnight. You need that kind of knowledge, incubation, testing and sandbox for those things to happen. So these centres of excellence will act as the ecosystem for that particular sector.

The CM during his budget speech also talked about how the state wants to attract global talent here. What are the steps being taken for this?

We are trying to attract global talent, but also send our talent across the globe. Our human resource is that agile and good. We are trying to attract global investments.

The industry minister has announced a complete overhaul of the industry and policies and the ease of doing business. That is something that the government will be pursuing extremely seriously to ensure that we get global investments.