About Us

Grassroots Innovations Augmentation Network - North ( GIAN-North ) came into existence on January 18, 2003 as an autonomous body by the joint initiative of Government of Rajasthan and National Innovation Foundation, Ahmedabad (NIF). It is registered as a society under Society's Act 1958 under the chairmanship of Sh. Inderjit Khanna, Commissioner, State Election Commission (Former Chief Secretary of Rajasthan). Its governing board comprises of senior government officials many at secretary level, academicians, Entrepreneur, Innovator, NGO and member from NIF. The area of operation is the states of Northern India i.e., States of Jammu & Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, Punjab, Haryana, Uttranchal, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, NCT of Delhi and UT of Chandigarh. The financial support is provided by NIF for the initial three years and a corpus contribution of Rs. 50 lacs by the government of Rajasthan along with infrastructure support through state DST.

The very purpose was to strengthen the initiatives of NIF at regional level in a result oriented manner to help support the innovations/ innovators at grassroots. This is done by providing handholding support to the rural innovators and links them to the formal systems of technical, financial and marketing services such that a viable business model could be developed out of the rural innovation. In the GIAN model, emphasis is on a resource in which economically poor people are rich that is their knowledge, innovations or practices. GIAN tries to add value to this knowledge and facilitate the commercial and non-commercial diffusion. This generates rewards for the innovators and more efficient green choices for the consumers and people struggling with same or similar problems.

The mandate of GIAN (North) is to link grassroots innovation with enterprise development which includes:-
1. Incubation (Idea to product/practice)
2. Product development (development of product prototype)
3. Intellectual Property Protection (patenting, trademarks)
4. Market Research and Venture Promotion (Project Planning, Technology transfer, commercial launch, pilot and Commercial scale Production, distribution and vendor development and dissemination of information)
5. Cross-regional technology diffusion/ replication/ transfer.

The Augmentation activities are now supported through the Micro Venture Innovation Fund provided to NIF by SIDBI. HDFC has also come forward and sanctioned a fund for supporting such innovations

National Innovation Foundation (NIF) is the apex body established in March 2000 as an autonomous society with a corpus fund from the Department of Science and Technology, GOI and institutional support from IIM Ahmedabad. The Finance Minister in his budget speech of 1999 had announced the establishment of NIF. The objective of NIF is to unleash the true potential of innovators and traditional knowledge experts at grassroots who are economically poor but knowledge rich, who could neither, have privilege of formal education nor could mobilize any support required in augmenting their knowledge from organized sector. NIF helps such grassroots innovators by recognizing, respecting and rewarding their creativity. NIF scouts their innovations; helps them in nurturing them and finally scaling them up in the form of commercial enterprises. NIF honours innovators and traditional knowledge experts through a competition. In the year 2002 during second award function and in 2005 during third award function, the President of India gave away the annual awards to grass roots innovators at New Delhi and Ahmedabad respectively..

DR. R.A. Mashelkar, Director General of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) is the Chairperson of NIF and Prof Anil Gupta of IIM, Ahmedabad who has been instrumental in the whole initiative is its Executive Vice Chairperson.