To support young entrepreneurs, the central government will launch ‘special funds’ for those in the 16-21 years and 21-26 years age groups.
“It’s on the drawing board. We have accumulated funds worth Rs 9,000 crore under the technology cess category, and we want to use this. We might launch incubation centres, innovation hubs and even funds. This country requires investments of Rs 10,000 crore annually if we want to give boost to entrepreneurship,” said Y S Chowdary, Minister of State for Science & Technology and Earth Sciences.
He was speaking on the sidelines of the 11th edition of Indian Science and Technology Entrepreneurs Park & Business Incubators Association (Isba) here on September 9.
The fund will be over and above the Rs 10,000 crore fund-of-funds for start-ups announced by the government early this year.
Over the past two years, the funding to several government departments supporting incubation in India has seen a spurt. H K Mittal, Advisor, Department of Science and Technology (DST), said that the support for incubators has gone up 10 times.
“DST’s finance has gone up by at least 4.5x to Rs 180 crore for FY17. Several of our programmes like ‘Power of Idea’, Eureka and Entrepreneur-in-residence have seen their fund corpus going up. Our seed support programme has gone up five times. We can now fund start-ups starting from Rs 50 lakh to Rs 1 crore,” he added.
According to Kshatrapati Shivaji, Chairman and Managing Director of SIDBI, the idea behind creating the fund-of-funds was to give a push to domestic venture capitalists (VCs). “We have already committed Rs 800 crore across 19 VCs, which, in turn, will mobilise the investments.”
The event also saw the signing of the first Indo-US Joint Early Stage Fund with a corpus of $40 million. About 50 per cent contribution for the fund comes from incubators that come under Isba and India Electronics & Semiconductor Association and the rest of the funds will have contribution from high net worth individuals based out of the US and serial entrepreneurs such as Sanjay Sharma, CEO of Roambee Corporation. At present, Isba supports around 100 incubators across India.
Source: Business Standard
