The G20 Digital Innovation Alliance (DIA) Initiative roadshow was organised in Amsterdam by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) Startup Hub, Government of India, and FICCI with the aim of promoting the G20 DIA Summit, which will be held in Bengaluru from August 17–19, 2023.
According to a formal announcement by MeitY Startup Hub CEO Jitendra Vijay, MeitY formed the G20 Digital Innovation Alliance during India’s G20 Presidency to bring together the startup ecosystems of the G20 countries and the nine invited guest countries. We are currently in the Netherlands because it is one of the 29 nations taking part in this programme and is a member of the EU system. So, he continued, “we organised this meeting with the startups and the startup stakeholders of this country with the help of the Dutch government.”
Vijay said that an interesting fact is that based on the interactions here with startups in the Netherlands, it is no surprise that quite a lot of these startup founders are of Indian origin. They may have come to the Netherlands for their education or for employment and because of the entrepreneurial spirit in them, some of them have gone out and created the startups in collaboration with the local partners.
This is a wonderful testament to the world working together, where a person of Indian origin living in the Netherlands is collaborating with a local citizen to create an impactful startup, which can solve the world’s problems. Out of six startups selected by the Netherlands Govt, four startup promoters are of Indian origin.
Under the DIA initiative, six sectors like Agritech, Healthtech, Edutech, Fintech, Cybersecurity and Circular economy are selected for humanity’s development. Each of the 29 governments is nominating a top startup in each of these six sectors.
Therefore, 174 startups will participate in. G20 DIA Summit scheduled from August 17-19, 2023 in Bengaluru. Mohit Mishra, an Indian-origin founder of Automicle which is one of the six startups selected by the Netherlands government to participate in the G20 DIA Summit, said, for us this is a fantastic opportunity, India is already a huge market. We are based in the Netherlands with a huge push across the globe for mobility as a service industry or integrated mobility or sustainable modes of mobility. Increasing access for people to sustainable modes of transportation is a large societal goal for us. We are just being part of it playing our role. That definitely makes us a very interesting startup to play its role in the ecosystem, driving sustainability goals for everybody, he said.
Vijay, who is a professor here and created a start-up said that his startup is trying to solve a global water quality problem. The main innovation is the water quality monitoring device that measures water quality that is quite affordable and the data gets stored in a blockchain data lake.
