Aspire Scheme

Core Objectives

Salient Features of Scheme

• Establish Livelihood Business Incubators (LBIs) in rural and underserved areas to promote innovation and entrepreneurship.
• Generate employment through formal, scalable micro-enterprises in the agro-rural sector.
• Skill, up-skill, and re-skill workers in new agro-rural technologies.
• Supply skilled human capital to industrial clusters and strengthen MSME competitiveness through innovation.

• Ministry: Ministry of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSME)
• Launch: 2015
• Implementing Agencies: Ministry of MSME, implemented through designated institutions and approved incubators
• Type: Central sector scheme with grants for incubator set-ups.
• Focus Areas: Rural enterprises, agro-business, technology-driven start-ups and service enterprises with scalability potential.
• Approach: Creation of an incubation ecosystem with hand-holding, mentoring, and capacity building for entrepreneurs.
• Support & Financial Assistance
  • Incubator Grants: Financial support for setting up Livelihood Business Incubators (LBIs) and Technology Business Incubators (TBIs) to nurture ideas into viable enterprises.
    • LBI is an entity set up for imparting skill development & incubation programmes for promoting entrepreneurship sector with special focus and employment generation in agro-rural on rural and underserved areas.
  • Grant support: One-time capital grant of up to ₹1 crore for Government/PSU incubators and up to ₹75 lakh for private/PPP incubators for plant & machinery.
  • Operational Expenditure: A one-time grant of maximum up to 1 crore for the purpose of extending support for running day to day operations.
  • Risk Capital / Seed Support: Assistance for early-stage innovators and enterprise prototypes.
  • Cluster Strengthening: Support for enterprise clusters to build scale and improve market linkages.
• Coverage and Eligibility
  • Institutes Eligible:All MSMEs with an Entrepreneurs Memorandum (EM) registration
  • Entrepreneur Support: Individual innovators and entrepreneurs benefit through incubation services including mentoring, business planning, market linkage and finance facilitation.