The Union Government has created a Rs 10,000 crore fund of funds to help startups across the country. This was stated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi himself. The PM has adopted his own style of reaching out to cross sections of the society through his NaMo app via video conferencing.
The most recent interaction involved young entrepreneurs from some Tier 2 cities including Dehradun, Guwahati and Raipur and the theme was on the support the government is giving to startups. It is in this context that the PM made this announcement of the fund of funds and he said already an amount of Rs 7,000 crores has been released by venture capital funds based on the government’s initiative and it can stretch this to over Rs 1 lakh crore throughout the country.
Besides just the funding part, there are other initiatives taken by the government to strengthen the startup ecosystem and these include setting up of tinkering labs, incubation centres, removing regulatory hurdles, providing tax incentives and support in the field of legal issues and intellectual property rights.
The PM called upon the youth in the country to take benefit of these incentives and display the courage and the sensitivity to issues being faced by the society to ideate and come forward to setup the startups in different fields. He said there has been an encouraging response to the measures introduced by the government and going beyond the much-trodden paths of finance and technology, areas like agriculture have also seen startups coming up. A special Agricultural Grand Challenge has been floated to draw young and innovative minds to share their ideas and innovate new ways of cultivation, irrigation and so on.
Startups can not only espouse the Make In India concept but adopt the Design in India slogan too. According to the PM, on an average, one startup can employ 12 people helping the job creation process as well. He gave out some statistics during his speech; as per this, 419 districts in the country have witnessed startups being registered and close to 45% of these are in cities and towns away from the urban clusters. He also claimed that the last four years have seen a quantum increase in the number of trademarks and patents being registered, indicating a healthy trend.
People who have innovative ideas can share them on the Twitter handle #innovate India.
The PM assured the young entrepreneurs and through them the millions of youth in the country that the government will support them all the way, from freeing them from inspector-raj to helping with the funding and finally even assist in finding the market for their products.