Gautam Adani launches Vande Bharatam to find entrepreneurs across India

MUMBAI: Gautam Adani spent his 64th birthday handing out an invitation, not a cheque. The Adani Group chairman launched Vande Bharatam, a nationwide initiative to track down innovators and entrepreneurs in every one of India’s 36 states and union territories, and across more than 800 districts, a deliberate attempt to widen the hunt for talent far beyond the handful of cities that usually hog the spotlight.

The programme is built to look past the usual startup hubs entirely, inviting entries from cities, towns and villages alike, regardless of age, educational background, or whether the applicant has so much as a registered company to their name. Entries can come as little more than an idea, a rough prototype, an early-stage venture, or a fully established business, and they are welcome across technology, manufacturing, sustainability, agriculture, traditional crafts and community-led solutions. Dedicated tracks have been carved out to back women, tribal entrepreneurs, rural innovators and Divyang entrepreneurs specifically.

The funnel narrows fast after that. Regional evaluation rounds will whittle the field down to 75 finalists, who then get an intensive mentorship and investment programme in Ahmedabad, building towards a grand finale timed around Independence Day.

Adani framed the launch in distinctly personal terms, saying he began his journey with nothing and that everything he has built came from the soil of Bharat, before adding that India suffers no shortage of talent, only an uneven spread of opportunity. He went further, arguing that despite building one of the world’s largest startup ecosystems, India still sees most of its founders emerge from a tiny cluster of cities, and that Vande Bharatam exists to find the innovators, problem solvers and entrepreneurs whose ideas deserve recognition, support and a bigger stage, inviting every Indian with the nerve to build and the will to create to step forward.

Finalists get more than a pat on the back for their trouble. The programme offers access to industry leaders, incubation support, strategic partnerships, prize money and category-based recognition, a fairly serious bet on the idea that India’s next big company might be sitting in a district nobody in Mumbai or Bengaluru has heard of yet. Applications for the national initiative opened on 24th June through the official website.

For a businessman whose name is more readily associated with ports, power plants and balance sheets the size of small nations, this is a different kind of bet entirely, one staked not on infrastructure but on people nobody has met yet. If Vande Bharatam delivers even a fraction of the founders it is hunting for, India’s startup map is about to get a great deal bigger than its current handful of postcodes.