For youth of India, ‘Startup India, Stand Up India’ campaign aimed at boosting entrepreneurship. Start-ups and entrepreneurship are critical to India’s efforts to restart private investment into the economy, in the face of risk aversion, stalled or slow investments from corporate India. Start-up India’ initiative was launched in January 2016 by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in a move to help start-ups and catalyse entrepreneurship. Being a good move ,it has not achieved its goal. Government needs to re look into it.
The Action Plan requires an enterprise or partnership to be innovative by developing and commercialising a new product or service — a step to promote truly innovative ideas. But it institutes an inter-ministerial body led by DIPP to examine whether an enterprise is ‘innovative’.
It also requires a ‘recommendation’ from an incubator setup by the government or be supported by an incubator in a post-graduate institution recognised by the government — this need for validation and recommendation goes against the very steps the Action Plan takes to reduce government involvement. This additional layer of bureaucracy could slow down the starting up process and needs to go.
Third year on, since the launch of Startup India Stand Up India campaign, the mood is slightly muted, the momentum slowed a bit and the talk shifted from bombastic projections of crossing Silicon Valley to more realistic targets of making India an innovation hub. But entrepreneurs and investors acknowledge that after January 16,2015, the needle on entrepreneurship has certainly dramatically moved. Over the last 2 years ,there was lot of out-of the box thinking and a sense of direction given.
While initiatives like start up certification, roping in bodies like CBDT to give tax breaks to entrepreneurs, setting up incubators and tinkering labs have been lauded there is a lot more that could have been done. While the progress is slow, the ecosystem feels much supported as the government put light on their struggles and achievements. However, there is a lot more that can be done in programming and implementation of start-up India action plan.
Start-up India is consistent with the PM’s call for innovation when he launched Digital India. The Start-up India Action plan is a good start to this – but will need continued support and evolution to make this a true, deep revolution for the youth of India.
