Envisaged as India’s largest incubator for startups, T Hub (Telangana Hub of Startups) was launched by Tata Sons emeritus chairman Ratan Tata at Cyber City in Hyderabad on Thursday. Addressing a gathering drawn from different parts of the world, Tata pledged to invest more in the two-stage T Hub in the next three years. However, he did not specify the quantum. Initially around 200 startups will be incubated here.
Telangana Information and Technology Minister K.T. Rama Rao, who has helped in the launch of the project, urged Tata to be the mentor of the T Hub and guide it over the years.
Governor E.S.L. Narasimhan, who turned 70 on Thursday, expressed happiness at the launch of the T Hub and said it was nothing short of a birthday present for him to view the state of the art T Hub complex which came up on the campus of the Indian Institute of Information Technology (IIIT) at Gachibowli in the outskirts of the city.
Telangana government has proposed to spend about Rs 660 crore on the two phases of T Hub in the next three years. Whereas the first phase of the incubation centre is built on a 70,000 sq ft plot at a cost of Rs 10 crore, the second phase will be constructed on a three lakh sq.ft area at a cost of Rs 100 crore. The first phase will house 200 startups, while the next one will incubate around 500.
A total 2,000 entrepreneurs, including 800 in the first phase, are expected to be accommodated in the T Hub. IT, robotics, data analytics, artificial intelligence and food and agriculture processing, biomedical and biotechnology firms are being preferred in the first phase, according to a senior official in the IT department who spoke to The Sunday Guardian.
The IT department of Telangana government is in talks with Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Labs and University of Texas to seek their expertise in promoting incubation at T Hub. IIIT and the National Academy of Legal Studies and Research (NALSAR), both based in Hyderabad, are the co-promoters of the T Hub.
Addressing the audience during the launch ceremony, K.T. Rama Rao said the Telangana Rashtra Samithi government led by his father K. Chandrasekhar Rao (KCR) would go all out to make Hyderabad a capital of startups in India.