To help India become an inventive and creative society and a global leader in sustainable technology by scouting, spawning and sustaining grassroots innovations,
To ensure evolution and diffusion of green grassroots innovators in a selective, time-bound and mission-oriented basis so as to meet the socio-economic and environmental needs of our society. To provide institutional support in scouting, spawning, sustaining, and scaling up grassroots green innovations and helping their transition to self-supporting activities, seeking self-reliance through competitive advantage of innovation-based enterprises and/or application of people-generated sustainable technologies at grassroots level,
To build linkages between excellence in formal scientific systems and informal knowledge systems and create a knowledge network to link various stakeholders through applications of information technologies and also otherwise,
To promote wider social awareness, and possible commercial and non-commercial applications of the know-how generated as a result of above and encourage its incorporation in educational curriculum, developmental policies and programmes.
In the second NIF National Campaign of contemporary unaided technological innovations and outstanding traditional knowledge, an encouraging number of innovations were received from 300 districts all across the country. This tremendous achievement was reflected in the Honourable Finance Minister’s Budget speech last year: “The National Innovation Foundation was set up in March 2000.......This initiative has shown a good result. In the second annual campaign NIF has received more than 11000 entries from all over the country, up from 948 entries in the first year. Encouraged by this enthusiastic response I propose to set up a micro venture capital fund for small innovations......... to facilitate the transition of innovations to enterprises.”