PM launches innovation challenge for homegrown apps, winners to get ₹20L

New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Saturday launched 'Aatmanirbhar Bharat App Innovation Challenge' to facilitate the techies and start-up community to create world-class Made in India Apps.

The challenge is an endeavour of Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology and Atal Innovation Mission. Taking to Twitter, Prime Minister said that there is immense enthusiasm among the tech and start-up community to create world class Made in India Apps.

"Today there is immense enthusiasm among the tech & start-up community to create world class Made in India Apps. To facilitate their ideas and products @GoI_MeitY and @AIMtoInnovate are launching the Aatmanirbhar Bharat App Innovation Challenge," he tweeted.

In another tweet, Prime Minister Modi urged tech community to participate.

"This challenge is for you if you have such a working product or if you feel you have the vision and expertise to create such products. I urge all my friends in the tech community to participate. Sharing my thoughts in my @LinkedIn post," he tweeted attaching LinkedIn post.

In his LinkedIn post, PM Modi wrote, "Nowadays, we are seeing huge interest and enthusiasm among the start-up and tech ecosystem to innovate, develop and promote homegrown apps. Today, when the entire nation is working towards creating an Aatmanirbhar Bharat, it is a good opportunity to give direction to their efforts, momentum to their hard-work and mentorship to their talent to evolve Apps which can satisfy our market as well as compete with the world."

He wrote that this challenge will run in two tracks--Promotion of existing apps and development of new apps.

"Track-01 will work in mission mode for identifying good quality Apps for the leader-board and shall be completed in around a month. Track-02 initiative will work to help create new champions in India by providing support in ideation, incubation, prototyping and roll out along with market access," he wrote in the post.

The outcome of this challenge will be to give better visibility and clarity to existing Apps to achieve their goals, and to create tech products to find solutions to tech conundrums with the help of mentorship, tech support and guidance during the entire life-cycle, he wrote.

Prime Minister Modi in his post said that there is tremendous scope among these sectors for new Apps that solve specific issues for India and the world.

"Can we think of making traditional Indian games more popular via Apps? Can we develop Apps with targeted and smart access to the right age group for learning, gaming, etc? Can we develop gaming apps for people in rehabilitation or getting counselling to help them in their journey? There are many such questions and technology alone can give answers in a creative manner," said PM Modi.

Recently, the government has banned 59 mobile apps linked to China including Tik Tok, UC Browser, Helo, YouCam makeup and Mi Community in view of the information available that they are engaged in activities which are "prejudicial to sovereignty and integrity and defence" of the country.

Almost all the apps banned on Monday have some preferential Chinese interest and the majority have parent Chinese companies.

The ban came amid border tensions with China in Eastern Ladakh.