Pramod Thomas By

KOCHI: Soon Kerala will have the fastest internet connectivity in the country as it envisages to provide 2 Gigabytes per second (Gbps) speed to incubators which nurture startups in the state.

At present, the Startup Village in Kochi is way ahead of the Prime Minister’s Office in terms of internet speed as it has 1 Gigabytes per second (Gbps) speed compared to 34 megabytes per second (Mbps) at the PMO. The target is likely to benefit the state, particularly startups, in a candid way as the average internet connection speed in India is only 2 Mbps. The draft Kerala Technology Startup Policy 2014 published recently aims at providing fully furnished and ready to use plug and play infrastructure along with computers with maximum 2 Gbps internet connectivity, electricity, water, security and other facilities to set up incubators. It aims at starting at least 10 such incubators in the state by 2020.

“The internet connectivity speed as detailed in the draft policy will be of great help to startups in the state. If such a speed is provided, companies do not need to lay a dedicated line for faster internet connectivity. This will provide a good edge for Kerala-based startups over other companies across the country. But enough fund has to be allotted for it by the state government,” said Ajit George, Chief Operating Officer, Finahub, a company incubated at startup village.

He pointed out that instead of allotting one per cent of the total budget to startups by each department there should be a single window mechanism for accumulating and disbursing the amount.

The Startup Policy that envisions billion dollar technology companies from the startups in Kerala, aims at attracting Rs 5,000 crore in investments into the incubation and startup ecosystem in Kerala. Paving the way for a startup revolution in the state, the policy says 10,000 technology product startups will be started in the state in six years’ time.

“As part of providing infrastructure for startups, the state government would host a cloud server in the state data centre that would connect all the incubation centres across the state. The server would be beneficial to all the startups at nominal costs,” the draft policy stated.