India will emerge as a lighthouse for the world in the field of innovation: Rajnath Singh

Subject : Governance

Concept :

Defence Minister Rajnath Singh on Wednesday expressed confidence that India will soon be among the leading countries in the field of innovation and emerge as the “lighthouse” to the entire world.
Speaking after inaugurating the annual defence innovation event ‘Manthan’ during Aero India here, he said, if we want to bring the next generation industrial revolution, then we should either do new things or try to do the existing things in a new way.

Manthan Platform

Organised by Innovations for Defence Excellence (iDEX), the Manthan platform brings leading innovators, start-ups, MSMEs, incubators, academia and investors from the defence & aerospace ecosystem under one roof.

Innovation for Defence Ecosystem (iDEX)

iDEX, launched in 2018, is an ecosystem to foster innovation & technology development in Defence and Aerospace by engaging innovators & entrepreneurs to deliver technologically advanced solutions for modernizing the Indian Military.
The Government has approved a central sector scheme for iDEX with budgetary support of Rs. 498.78 crore for the next 5 years from 2021-22 to 2025-26.

Core Objectives:

Indigenization: Rapid development of new, indigenized and innovative technology.
Innovation: Creates a culture of engagement with innovative startups to encourage co-creation.
It provides funding/grants to MSMEs, start-ups, individual innovators, R&D institutes and academia to carry out research and development.
The iDEX-Prime aims to support projects requiring support beyond Rs 1.5 crore up to Rs 10 crore, to help ever-growing start-ups in the defence sector.
iDEX is funded and managed by “Defence Innovation Organisation”.
iDEX portal was launched to provide wider publicity and better visibility of iDEX activities and enable more efficient running of future challenges through better information management.

Defence Innovation Organisation (DIO)

DIO is established by the Department of Defence Production (DDP) is aimed at promoting innovation and indigenisation in the aerospace and defence sector at the start-up level.
DIO is a not for profit organisation formed under section 8 of the Companies Act 2013.
It is funded by Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL) and Bharat Electronics Limited (BEL).
It provides high-level policy guidance to iDEX.