Flooded with over 400 calls a day at the recently launched Startup Hub, the government is scaling up big time to deal with the deluge of budding entrepreneurs. The Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion (DIPP) has started mapping incubation centres across the country to extend help to business ideas. The government will also engage the private sector and state governments in building incubation capacities for young entrepreneurs.

“This is the basic requirement for any startup to take off…right now, all such centres are concentrated in IITs or cities such as Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Delhi NCR, which is a limitation,“ a senior government official said.

The DIPP is ascertaining state-wise capacities of incubation to take up the startup movement in tier-II and III cities, and focus especially on the north eastern states of India. As part of the Startup India action plan announced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the government plans to create sector specific incubators under the Atal Innovation Mission along with 500 tinkering labs to promote entrepreneurship, provide pre-incubation training and a seed fund for high growth startups.

The NITI Aayog is formulating guidelines for implementing the Atal Innovation Mission. The private sector is proposed to be roped in big time. “We are going beyond what has already been announced…Government may not have the required expertise to provide the incubation facilities. We are discussing ways to involve the private sector in this exercise,“ the official said.

The idea is to use incubation centres as commercial proposition or part of corporate social responsibility to engage the private companies. Besides, the government will also identify 10 incubators, evaluated on pre-defined key performance indicators and give them Rs 10 crore each as financial aid to ramp up their infrastructure.

The DIPP recently launched the startup hub along with the startup portal and mobile app to provide a single point contact for the entire startup ecosystem. The portal will enable startups to avail all the tax benefits announced in the startup action plan.

Some of the incentives announced include a tax holiday and `inspector raj’-free regime for three years, capital gains tax exemption and Rs 10,000 crore corpus for funding of startups. To reduce the regulatory burden on startups, a self-certification scheme in respect of nine labour and environment laws has also been initiated by various government departments.

Source: The Economic Times