Startup India Action Plan Will Turbocharge Startup Ecosystem

TechnoparkToday.com(Jan, 2016)> Sweeping reforms announced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi as part of the flagship Startup India action plan will turbocharge the startup ecosystem in the country encouraging more bright young minds to take the plunge into entrepreneurship, Startup Village Chairman Sanjay Vijayakumar said today.

On Saturday, Mr. Modi announced a series of measures including tax breaks, regulatory changes to end red-tapism and a corpus fund of Rs 10,000 crore to bolster start-ups in India.

Mr. Vijayakumar, who was one of the invitees at the day-long global workshop that preceded the historic announcement in New Delhi, welcomed the initiatives including a three-year tax holiday, self-certification scheme with respect to nine labour and environmental laws; and changes to insolvency norms that will allow easy exit for companies.

“Self-certification for compliance will reduce the regulatory burden on startups allowing them to stay up, and the ease of shutting down will encourage risk taking,” he said.
PPP incubators, such as Startup Village, will get a huge boost with the additional funding announced, Mr. Vijayakumar noted.

Taking a cue from the successful PPP blue print of Startup Village, Govt of India has decided to convert 35 existing incubators to PPP model and start another new 35 incubators in PPP model with private sector managing the incubators.

Kerala has gained three new incubators at IIM-K, NIT-K and IISER, Trivandrum.

He added that the states that are the quickest off the block in creating supporting policies and their execution will benefit the most from the Startup India programme.

As the founder of MobME, one of the country’s most successful startups in the telecom industry, and Startup Village, India’s first PPP model technology business incubator, Mr. Vijayakumar was among technopreneurs invited to the day-long discussion on startup entrepreneurship and the launch of the Startup India action plan at Vigyan Bhavan in New Delhi.

He was chosen to moderate a session on the topic “How digitisation will change India’s future”, featuring Zomato founder Mr. Deepinder Goyal; Mr. Pratyus Patnaik, Co-founder, Appurify; Mr. Rajat Tandon, Senior Director, NASSCOM (10K Startups Accelerator) and Mr. Saurabh Tandon, Partner, Alpheas Advisors.