Despite their high mortality rate, start-ups continue to proliferate. India is currently home to about 4,750 start-ups and over 2,000 were founded in 2016 alone.
Realising their potential in the creation of jobs and wealth, various State Governments are competing to attract the fledgling companies.
On offer are affordable prices, financial incentives, expensive IT tools and solutions and cloud space. State governments are even relaxing their otherwise rigid procurement policies to ensure start-ups get assured work.
As many as 13 State governments, including Karnataka, Telangana, Gujarat and Andhra Pradesh, have come up with dedicated policies for start-ups.
A Nasscom status report says that State governments have begun to align their policies with the Centre’s Start-up India mission. “They are formulating dedicated State-level policies targeting the start-up ecosystem,” it said. The report has placed Karnataka ahead of the others. “It provides for a dedicated start-up cell to implement its policy. Start-ups registered with the cell get software tools, cloud, credits and other resources.”
Kerala’s Startup Village, a commune hosting hundreds of start-ups in Kochi that was launched in 2012, has become a role model for governments such as Andhra Pradesh to experiment with similar approaches.
Andhra Pradesh has just launched a Fintech Start-up Tower in Visakhapatnam to provide free space, connectivity and quality manpower with skills in niche technologies such as block-chain. “We are going to create a fund of funds to take care of the investment needs of start-ups,” said JA Chowdary, IT Advisor to the Andhra Pradesh Government.
Nasscom is setting up warehouses in several States to groom start-ups with the assistance of local governments and ecosystem partners.
Telangana stands up
“We are looking at three broad areas — offering incentives for new start-ups, making amendments to procurement policies and creating a fund that pools all the incentives we get from the Centre,” said Konatham Dileep, the Telangana government’s Director (Social Media).
Telangana’s Innovation Policy proposes a Rs2,000-crore Master Fund for sector-specific investments and a ‘T-SEED Fund’ with a corpus of Rs250 crore to provide initial financial support to start-ups. Telangana IT Minister KT Rama Rao said a Start-up Council with Ministers, venture capitalists and other stakeholders will guide the ecosystem.
Start-ups upbeat
Though operational guidelines are yet to come up, start-ups are elated with the incentives being offered in Telangana’s Innovation Policy. “The policy and its approach are exciting — from getting us access to global innovation hubs like Silicon Valley, to creating a thriving ecosystem through T-Hub and to floating a Rs2,000 crore innovation fund. This may even enable Hyderabad to become the innovation and start-up hub of India,” said Saneesha, Co-founder of LeanSpoon, a start-up that offers personalised meals.
Venu Dantuluri , who came up with Aqua App for 75,000 aqua farmers along the Andhra coast, says the Telangana start-up policy encourages a Co-Incubation programme for agritech companies. “As an agritech company, I get mentorship and space at T-Hub or IIIT. We are setting up our office at IIIT and are really looking forward to scaling up from there,” he said.
Source: The Hindu Business Line
