Eight teams bag ₹15-lakh seed grant at Puduvai Innovation Contest

The Puduvai Innovation Competition (PIC) 2026 concluded with a grand finale at the Central Auditorium of Puducherry Technological University (PTU) on Sunday, capping a student innovation drive that attracted 254 teams from engineering colleges across Puducherry.

After multiple phases of evaluation, as many as eight teams secured a Seed Grant of ₹15 lakh support.

Jointly organised by the Union Ministry of Education, Directorate of Higher and Technical Education (Government of Puducherry), and PTU as lead host — with Atal Incubation Centre-PEC Foundation (AIC-PECF) as State execution partner — the event was co-funded under the PM-USHA Scheme.

Organised under the theme “From Ideas to Impact,” the Innovation Competition was conceived as a dynamic platform to identify, nurture, and support innovative ideas from the student ecosystem, helping transform early-stage concepts into scalable solutions through structured mentoring, prototyping support, and incubation opportunities.

According to an official, the competition was structured across four levels: in Level 1, 70 teams were shortlisted from 254 applications based on their concept submissions; Level 2 saw prototype presentations evaluated by expert panel, narrowing the field to 30 teams; Level 3 comprised a structured mentorship bootcamp followed by a business model pitch, from which the top 15 teams were selected for the final; and in Level 4, the final pitches were presented before a jury on Sunday.

Professor S. Mohan, Vice-Chancellor of PTU underscored the university’s unwavering commitment to fostering a culture of innovation and entrepreneurship among its students. He said that PTU has always believed that the true measure of education lies not merely in academic achievement but in the ability to solve real-world problems.

“The PIC-2026 has shown that our students are more than ready to rise to that responsibility,” he said.

Armstrong Pame, Joint Secretary, Ministry of Education, Government of India, lauded the initiative as a powerful reflection of the PM-USHA Scheme’s core objective of transforming higher education institutions into engines of innovation, employability, and entrepreneurship.

He observed competitions such as PIC-2026 were precisely the kind of ground-level interventions that the Ministry envisions when it invests in the higher education ecosystem of Union Territories.

“What we are witnessing here today is not just a competition — it is the beginning of a startup movement rooted in the soil of Puducherry. The Ministry of Education is committed to scaling such initiatives and ensuring that every deserving idea finds the support it needs to grow into a solution that serves the nation,” he said.

At the Grand Finale, the top eight teams of PIC-2026 were awarded a Prototyping Grant of ₹10,000 each in recognition of their innovation and prototype development work. The winning teams were awarded the SEED Support Grant worth a total of ₹15 lakh under the Ministry of Education PM-USHA Scheme.

The winning teams will also receive incubation and scale-up support from Atal Incubation Centre-PEC Foundation, along with mentorship from industry experts and access to the wider startup ecosystem.