ONGC announces Rs 100 crore fund for startups

Following the bandwagon, it is now State-owned Oil and Natural Gas Corp (ONGC), who has recently announced a Rs 100-crore startup fund to nurture new ideas related to the sector in New Delhi.

Named ‘ONGC Startup’, the startups under the initiative will be provided with the entire support chain that includes seed capital, hand-holding, mentoring market linkage, and follow-ups.

Said to be in line with the Government of India’s ‘Startup India’ initiative, the objective of the initiative is to increase the contribution of fresh implementable ideas in the oil and gas sector.

Dinesh K Sarraf, the ONGC chairman and managing director stated that this initiative will promote entrepreneurship among the young Indians by creating an ecosystem that is conducive to the growth of startups in the oil and gas sector, which has a huge potential for technology-enabled ideas.

He further added that the oil and gas sector is contributing enormously to the growth of the economy.

The sector currently faces various critical challenges and is in need of new ideas to mitigate them. To encourage its own employees to innovate, ONGC also awarded three of its young officers Rajendra Bhambhu, Deepak Naik, and Prajesh Chopra, for their novel ideas.

While Bhambhu and Naik developed an innovative safety device for rigs that facilitates setting up of emergency brakes to augment safety mechanism on drilling rigs, Chopra has come up with a unique Dual SIM Cellular Router System that provides data connectivity at work-over rigs.

Headquartered in Dehradun, Uttarakhand, ONGC is a Public Sector Undertaking (PSU) of the Government of India, under the administrative control of the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas.

It produces around 77 percent of India’s crude oil (equivalent to around 30 percent of the country’s total demand) and around 62 percent of its natural gas.