DARE - Because Entrepreneurs Do

On 26th January this year, 225 technocrats got together in 16 cities to mentor entrepreneurs from semi-urban and rural India

“The Mentor-Mentee interaction has been taken to a new scale with this event”, remarked Professor Chandru from Indian School of Business (ISB), Hyderabad,

while delivering his speech in the Entrepreneurship Mentoring Programme held on 26th January in Hyderabad. An initiative of Pan-IIT - the alumni association of IITians, the Indus Entrepreneurs, 3iInfotech and the National Entrepreneurship Network (NEN) in collaboration with Times of India, it covered 16 odd cities in the country, viz, Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Bhubaneshwar, Chandigarh, Chennai, Cochin, Delhi, Guwahati, Hyderabad, Indore, Jaipur, Kanpur, Kolkata, Mumbai, Patna and Pune.

The event has many firsts to its credits: the sheer size of the number of entrepreneurs (1020) and mentors (225) attending the event across the 16 cities of the country where it was simultaneously conducted, the scale that was achieved and the kind of audience that turned up for the event. Across the 16 cities, the audience was an optimal mix of around 500 startups, 200 working professionals, 150 growth-stage companies and around 170 students. Most of the entrepreneurs belonged to regions of the country which are still counted as small-towns or villages. In this sense, the programme truly reached out to the semi-urban and rural India, where although entrepreneurship thrives at several levels, it hasn’t reached appropriate scale owing to lack of resources and proper guidance. 

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