The Pune Smart City Development Corporation (PSCDC) has set up a new subsidiary, Pune Idea Factory Foundation(PIFF), which will serve as a one-stop shop for anything startup related in the city.
Maharashtra chief minister Devendra Fadnavis has said that he would like to make the city India’s number one destination for startups by 2020 and this initiative is a big step towards that.
Kunal Kumar, municipal commissioner, Pune Municipal Corporation, notified that they had studied startup models in eight cities over the past few months – Berlin, Tel Aviv, Paris, Chicago, Amsterdam, Hyderabad, Bengaluru and Kochi – before coming up with this.
The current advisory board members are NCL’s Dr Raghunath Mashelkar, Bajaj Auto’s Rajiv Bajaj, Ganesh Natarajan, chairman, 5F World and K Ganesh, cofounder, GrowthStory. The PIFF board comprises Kumar and Nitin Kareer, chairman, of PSCDC – which will be expanded to between seven to 12 people over the next few months.
The city has a large number of startups in the fintech, healthtech and edtech space, and a sizeable number of manufacturing and IT companies.
By Baishakhi Dutta
