Hyderabad: IT Minister K.T. Rama Rao advised T-Hub to focus on making a social impact in keeping with the advice of Chief Minister K. Chandrasekar Rao that technology which does not have any societal impact in a country like India is futile.

Speaking at the event held to mark the second anniversary of Telangana’s start-up initiative, he said the journey had just begun. “Even though T-Hub was ready in August 2015, we waited for Ratan Tata, a man who symbolises transformation and makes interesting choices in life, to inaugurate it,” Mr Rama Rao said.

He recalled that Mr Tata had called T-Hub “the new face of India”. He added that NITI Aayog was asking other states to emulate this initiative. He said that the State government had given start-ups such as Radikal Tribe and Banyan Nation, which had been employed to design the RTA’s m-wallet app and a waste management system for municipalities respectively, access to a market.

IT secretary Jayesh Ranjan said that five of the ten start-ups shortlisted for participation in the UBERExchange Programme were from the city. He said that an announcement regarding this would be made on November 29, at the Global Entre-preneurship Summit-2017. He added that T-Hub was also supporting the Governments of Goa and Assam in their entrepreneurial activities.