Startup India Hub to take up issues of unaware start-ups in accessing govt schemes

The Startup India Hub, recently launched by Commerce and Industry Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, is working on a new initiative in order to help start-ups get accessed to government schemes and venture funds directly from the platform. The initiative is taken by the government, as start-ups had been unaware of government schemes and facing difficulties in applying the same.

Currently, this initiative is working under Modi government’s Startup India programme. There are 167 schemes that have been listed to be beneficial for start-ups.

Some of the schemes that are being included are – Technology Development Programme, Software Technology Park scheme, Support for International Patent Protection, Electronic Development Fund Policy , Bank Credit Facilitation and Performance & Credit Rating Scheme.

“We are in the process of adding mo re functionalities to the virtual hub to make it more effective as a platform,“ said Karan Anand, Assistant Vice-President, Invest India.

The virtual hub will also be launched by the government in six languages. The Kannada version is expected to go live in the next two days, followed by Bengali and other languages.

The virtual hub, through its call centre have been receiving more than 60,000 queries from entrepreneurs across India in the past one year, and about 67 per cent of these queries have come in from tier-II and tier-III cities.