Mangaluru: From becoming a smart city, the Dakshina Kannada district will soon gear up to become the country’s first startup district.

As per reports commerce minister Nirmala Sitharaman, a Rajya Sabha MP from Karnataka, has been pitching for Mangalore to be chosen as the first startup district and an approval has already been accorded by department of industrial policy and promotion of the commerce ministry and the NITI Ayog.

A formal announcement on this is however yet awaited.

The plan envisages setting up of incubation centres, which will provide startups space to operate, and mentoring so that they can scale up their business and tinkering labs for schools as part of efforts to devise innovation solutions in agriculture, health and education.

It is gathered that apart from funding the initiative, the government will ensure that roads, electricity and digital networks are provided for the project. The incubation centres will provide specialised services for sectors including agriculture, medicine and pharma, along with information technology. A cost assessment for the same is yet to be estimated.

As per sources a team sent by Nirmala earlier this year will revisit the city once more to take up discussions with stakeholders to finalise the plan.

It may be added here that T V Mohandas Pai, Chairman, Manipal Global Education facilitated local contacts for the team that visited the city earlier to make a preliminary assessment for the startup project, which TOI reported in these columns on January 28.