CyberMedia’s Pradeep Gupta bags Best Entrepreneur Mentor award from India Govt.

NEW DELHI: CyberMedia (India) CMD Pradeep Gupta has bagged Best Entrepreneur Mentor award in the Private Category from government of India at the National Entrepreneurship Awards 2016. He received the award from India's  Home Affairs Minister Rajnath Singh and Minister of State for Skill Development and Entrepreneurship, Rajiv Pratap Rudy.

A first-generation entrepreneur, Pradeep Gupta is a B.Tech from IIT Delhi and PGDBM from IIM Kolkata. He forayed in the publishing industry with CyberMedia in 1982 at a time when Internet was far from pervasive in India, and logged in many firsts to his credit.  The CyberMedia Group, under his leadership went on to build media brands Dataquest, DQ Channels, The DQ Week, PCQuest, and Voice&Data among others, serving the information needs of the ICT industry in India.

Currently, CyberMedia is also executing India’s first Electropreneur Park, an incubation centre for Electronics start-ups. Gupta is also the Co-founder of Indian Angel Network, investing in 30-40 deals annually. He chairs the Alumni Trust, sponsors of IvyCap Ventures, with corpus of $140mn for series A and is on the board of IIM Kolkata Innovation Park.

He has been the global trustee of TIE, the World’s largest entrepreneurial ecosystem and served on Board of UTI AMC (AUM $20Bn) and its subsidiary UTI Capital, IIT Mandi and FITT. He is also past Chairman of PanIIT India Association.

The National Entrepreneurship Awards have been introduced by the Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship to encourage a culture of entrepreneurship across the country. These awards are organized to encourage and honour the Entrepreneurs and Entrepreneurship ecosystem builders for their remarkable efforts.

The awards have been presented in order to recognize the entrepreneurial spirit of India’s youth and encourage more young Indians to become entrepreneurs.

The Entrepreneurship Awards system has been created through a partnership between MSDE and a number of reputed institutions across the country including, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT - Delhi, Mumbai, Kanpur and Chennai), Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Mumbai and XLRI, Jamshedpur. Every year, one such institution will play the role of the lead institution to anchor the awards. For 2016-2017, the lead institution is IIT, Delhi.

India's Home Affairs Minister Singh in his speech highlighted the role of Entrepreneurship in making India a leading economy, globally. He also congratulated the winners and praised them for their exceptional achievements.

During the ceremony an overview of MSDE’s entrepreneurship initiatives were outlined by Minister of State, Rajiv Pratap Rudy. He also said that the Awards Ceremony will not only recognize budding entrepreneurs in India, but will also serve as a platform to showcase the transformative potential of entrepreneurship to young Indians and inspire them to become entrepreneurs.

This was followed by inspiring speeches by successful young entrepreneurs - Varun Khetan (Founder, Urban Clap), Shrikant Bolla (Founder Bollant Industries) and Ritesh Agarwal (Founder Bollant Industries) - who shared their experiences. Their entrepreneurial experiences were encouraging examples for the youth present at the ceremony.

Subsequently, Awards were presented in 11 categories under two selection tracks – Award Track and Recognition Track. These winners have been selected through a three stage rigorous selection process. An overview of the winners in these categories, under Award Track is given below:
· Agri, Food, & Forestry Products - Wow Momo Foods Private Ltd
· Chemicals, Pharma, Bio and other processed material - Saral Design Solutions Private Limited
· E-commerce, Logistics, Transport & other Services - JETSETGO Aviation Services
· Engineering Services - Swadha Energies
· IT &ITES, Financial - Lucideus Tech
· SC/ST - JeevAnksh Eco Products Private Limited
· Women - S V Engineering and Consultancy Services

Under recognition track, Awards were presented under four categories
· Education institute - RSETI, Karnataka
· Incubator - TREC-STEP Tiruchirappalli Regional Engineering College- Science and Technology Entrepreneurs Park
· Mentor (Government Sector) – Dr. Harkesh Kumar Mital, Head, National Science & Technology Entrepreneurship Development Board, (NSTEDB), Department of Science &Technology, Govt. of India.
· Mentor (Private Sector) - Mr. Pradeep Gupta, Chairman, CyberMedia Group

Winning individuals were given a prize amount of Rs 5 lakh, while winning organizations were given Rs 10 lakh, as prize money.