India’s Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi kicked off the ambitious Startup India Initiative on Saturday. This program has a fund allocation of $1.5 billion or close to Rs 2000 crore and aims to fill the gaps in the economy and provide an impetus to overall development and job creation within the existing construct.
Given the rising number of successful entrepreneurs across the country, India is quite on its way towards gaining prominence for almost being the world’s startup epicentre and given the success of many ventures like Flipkart, MJunction, InMobi and several others. So the question that probably comes to the fore now is how can this help the Indian Entrepreneurs and how will it significantly change the course of business there?
Reiterating his Government’s mantra of maximum governance, minimum government, the Prime Minister has assured that His Government will not come in the way of the start-ups and rather provide them with the required fillip through the Startup Action Plan. The list of sops and services that the Prime Minister has outlined for start-ups is quite comprehensive and extremely commendable. It includes creation of start-up hub, mobile app to enable registration in one day, creating fast-track mechanism for patent application, organise panel for legal support while filing for patent, offer 80% rebate on patent application fee and also relax norms in public procurement for start-ups.
While corporate India lapped up these initiatives with open hand and welcomed every bit of the Prime Minister’s effort to provide wing to the Startup India Action plan, as a concerned citizen my primary worry is how will this be executed? As we have seen in several sectors and policy initiatives, execution is often hindered due to inadequacy of the initiatives in thinking through the whole process and getting the right kind of mechanism in space. A case in point is perhaps the ‘Swaach Bharat Abhiyan’. While on paper it is a huge initiative and seeks to bring forth meaningful ends, the bottomline is two years after it was launched, it has now been reduced to a mere tax in most of the transactions that we engage in on a day to day basis while the need is to bring in some radical changes in our sanitation habits.
Therefore Modiji we just don’t need a superb policy to fan the startup wave in the country but also a solid execution plan that enables the benefits to percolate to the ultimate entrepreneurs and that alone can define the success of this initiative.
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