Hon’ble President Dr.A.P.J.Abdul Kalam graced the third national award function organized by NIF at IIMA on January 5, 2005 and gave away the awards to the outstanding grassroots innovators. He had given the awards at second Award function also.
In June 2002, the Commonwealth Science Council adopted the goals of the NIF, India, and the Honey Bee Network, as the direction of its future mission. The Commonwealth Science Council decided to become a Common Wealth Innovation Network ( though the move did not go very far due to aid politics).
NIF, chaired by Dr. R. A. Mashelkar, Director General, CSIR was set up in March 2000 by the DST with a corpus Rs. 20 crores, essentially in response to the work being carried out for the last 13 years by the voluntary members of the Honey Bee Network.
As a consequence of NIF mobilising more than 13,000 innovations and traditional knowledge examples in 2001, as against only 1600 practices in 2000, the Finance Minister of India announced in his budget speech of 2002 the setting up of a National Micro Venture Fund. The Honey Bee Network, supported by IIMA, SRISTI, SEWA, SIDBI, PEDES and many other voluntary institutions and individuals, mobilised more than 51,000 innovations and traditional knowledge examples from over 455 districts of India over the period of a decade. NIF has set up three incubators, the first of their kind, to convert innovations into enterprises, known as GIAN. The first GIAN was set up in 1997 in Gujarat and the other two have been set up in Jaipur and in the North East at IIT Guwahati.
NIF has facilitated the filing of patents through pro bono help in India as well as in USA on behalf of innovators, and in one case has even licensed the technology to a US company, with the entire money going to the innovator.
There is only one purpose in Professor Gupta’s life and that is to make India innovative and generate a new model of poverty alleviation and employment generation relying on innovation based enterprises, which can be replicated in other developing countries as well.
