NIFT TEA Knitwear Fashion Institute in Tirupur is one among the 10 institutions selected by NITI Aayog for setting up Atal Incubation Centre under Atal Innovation Mission (AIM) scheme.

The AIM was meant for the purpose of innovation and entrepreneurship promotion in India through various initiatives and the NITI Aayog would provide a grant-in-aid of up to Rs 10 crore for the period of 5 years to the established Atal Incubation Centers (AIC).

The grant would cover the capital and operational expenditures to set up the Centre, which would nurture innovative start-up businesses in their pursuit to become scalable and sustainable enterprises.

”The business incubator would be named as AIC -NIFTTEA Incubation Centre for Textiles and Apparels and will be inaugurated by next month,” NIFT-TEA Knitwear Fashion Institute Chairman C.M.N. Muruganandan said.

The recognition by NITI-Aayog is the great milestone to the NIFT TEA promoted and run by Tirupur Exporters’ Association, he said.

It is planned to have 10,000 sq.ft building to establish the incubation facilities comprising product development, training, conferencing and incubatee work space, in which budding entrepreneurs who want to create to start-ups in the areas of textiles and apparels could be enrolled as incubatee and nurture their innovative ideas.

The incubator would focus on developing product technologies of functional garments such as moisture management fabrics, bio textiles, seamless apparels, and blended apparels and so on, he said.

The other major focus area is process re-engineering technologies and process standardisation to achieve higher productivity, waste minimisation and achieving zero defects in the products and zero effects to the environment.

“AIC-NIFTTEA is in the process of creating pool of resources for providing hand holding supports to innovators, invites successful entrepreneurs, sectoral experts and Industrialists for mentoring the startups and financial institutions, angel investor’s access to seed capital funds,” Muruganandan said.

The centre has initiated to enter the cooperation agreement with the Textile Research Associations and industries for better access to technologies/ product evaluation/product developments, he said.