A year after the Startup India Action Plan was unveiled by the Prime Minister the Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion (DIPP) Secretary Ramesh Abhishek called it a “work-in-progress”.

Recounting the initiatives taken by the DIPP to provide structure to the developing startup ecosystem in the country, Abhishek shared it has been a year of learning for the government.

“We realised that there are a lot of regulatory changes that need to be made in the Company Law and various other regulations. Some guidelines became a little impractical and restricted free-flow of equity and funding to startups. However, we took feedback from various stakeholders and are now working with regulators. It is a work in progress,” said Abhishek while speaking at the Tie Global Summit held in New Delhi last week.

However, he insisted that despite the gap in regulations, the Government has taken many steps in accordance with the plan. The Government, he shared, has set up 300 centres for patent facilitation, applications have already been screened for setting up of 500 tinkering labs and shortlisted for setting up 100 new incubators.

Abhishek also spoke of taking several steps to provide ease of funding to startups, which he insisted, remains the biggest priority of the government. Terming the startup sector as the biggest source of employment creation, the secretary said priority remains to provide ease of funding to the new businesses.

A commitment, which the CEO of Niti Aayog Amitabh Kant seconded, by praising the three-year tax holiday granted to the startups which he said is a “big quantum jump by the tax department to provide impetus to the startups”. Kant predicted India will outpace Western technology through its digitisation plan in a matter of eight years.

“By 2020, India will be the only country with each citizen having biometric and smartphone. We would have bypassed all card-based transaction systems and will move to Aadhar-enabled and UPI-enabled systems. All manufacturing companies will become digital companies by then and all that has been created by the western world will become redundant in India,” said Kant.

Abhishek added that DIPP is actively engaged in hand-holding with 25,000 queries being directed to the Startup Hub to assist entrepreneurs.

Source: Economic Times