Shri Hardeep Puri, Minister of Housing & Urban Affairs and Petroleum & Natural Gas, today

reiterated the commitment of the Government to provide all support and facilitation to the start-ups involved in finding solutions towards promoting Swachhata. He said this while interacting with the startups shortlisted under Swachhata Start- up challenge.

Drawing attention towards some of the major cleanliness challenges, the Minister stated that plastic waste management, mechanized solutions to sewer and septic tank cleaning, scientific processing of solid and liquid waste etc. provide huge opportunities to the Startups for innovation and enterprise development.

Swachh Bharat Mission-Urban (SBM-U), MoHUA in collaboration with AFD (Agence Française de Développement) and Department of Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT), have launched the Swachhata Startup Challenge on 27^th Jan’22 to promote an enabling environment for development startups and entrepreneurs in the waste management sector.

The Swachhata Startup Challenge sought innovative solutions from Startups in waste management domain under four thematic areas, viz, (i) Social Inclusion, (ii) Zero Dump (Solid Waste Management), (iii) Plastic Waste Management and (iv) Transparency (Digital Enablement).

The challenge aimed to award 10 winning solutions from Startups with a financial support of ₹ 25 Lakh per selected project and 1-year incubation support. Apart from this, eligible startups will also get additional incentives which includes upto ₹50 Lakh of follow-on investment from Villgro (implementation partner of the challenge) and upto 100,000 USD worth credits & technology support from technology partner Amazon Web Services.

As part of the challenge, applications were invited from 27^th Jan, 2022 to 15^th April, 2022, against which a total of 244 solutions were received. Thereafter, screening of applications was done and 30 solutions were shortlisted for next round of evaluation by a Jury constituting of academicians, industry representatives, officials etc. The top 10 applications among these will be awarded as winners of the Challenge.  

The award ceremony to felicitate winners of the challenge is scheduled to be held tomorrow on 20^th Sept. 2022, at Dr. Ambedkar International Centre, New Delhi. The award event ‘Swachhata Startup Conclave’ will be a day long event and various activities are planned, including reverse pitch by Municipal Corporations to Startups, discussion on policy initiatives for promoting Startups for Garbage Free Cities, sharing of success stories by entrepreneurs & founders of Unicorns, and the award ceremony in the concluding session to felicitate the winning startups.

The conclave will be attended by all Startups of Swachhata Startup Challenge, established Startups, Investors, Sector Partners, Industry experts, Municipal Commissioners of million plus cities, representatives from DPIIT, Govt. of India, FCCII, CII and other associations. Around 600 participants will physically attend the event while all cities will virtually join the closing ceremony.

RKJ/M