ssocham has teamed up with a set of venture capital firms to float a

mobile technology incubation fund involving a corpus of around Rs 200 crore to begin with, said president Dilip Modi.

“The idea is to leverage on the high mobile penetration and mobile telephony infrastructure in the country to develop technologies that provide various services to the end users even in the remotest regions of the country,” said Modi.

Modi, who is also managing director of Spice Global of BK Modi group, said the trade body has recently concluded a study on the opportunities that the mobile technology space offered. Assocham has submitted the report to the telecom regulator, Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai).

The area of opportunities in the Assocham study included mobile health, mobile commerce, mobile education and mobile governance. Following this, Trai has come out with a consultation paper, which was circulated among all the stakeholders including mobile operators and platform owners.

Modi said the incubation fund will provide seed capital of anywhere between Rs 5 crore to Rs 10 crore to each entrepreneur to come up with innovation application development and kick start business. In all around 20 projects will be supported with the Rs 200 crore fund and Spice Global, which is into mobile technology space, will invest Rs 20 crore as an anchor investor.

Assocham, which is currently working closely with Ashish Dhawan of ChrysCapital has roped in the India Venture Capital Association to work with it, said Modi. The trade body is also in talks with various telecom operators, mobile handset manufacturers, software companies and chipset manufacturers.

Saying that Assocham has requested the AP state government to anchor the digital entrepreneurship programme, Modi said, “What we are looking at is general endorsement of the program, encourage venture capital funds with tax incentives and encourage technical educational institutions to participate in the programme. We want the anchor state government to create environment similar to software technology parks with plug and play infrastructure and create an eco system.”