Govt Initiates Comprehensive Action Plan To Boost Startup Investments

The Indian government is formulating an action plan to boost investments in startups, with potential enhancements to the seven-year-old Startup India initiative.

The DPIIT is planning to introduce indicators, such as monitoring investment inflows, tracking the number of startups in particular sectors, and evaluating employment generation, to gauge the growth and performance of startups in India, ET reported.

The plan involves identifying and addressing challenges related to regulatory approvals, taxation, ease of doing business, and global expansion for Indian startups.

As part of this initiative, efforts will also be made to identify key process bottlenecks that — hinder businesses, high-net-worth individuals (HNIs), and other investors, from investing in startups. Additionally, sector-specific challenges will be determined through this exercise.

The objective is to develop policy interventions and offer a range of short and long-term recommendations which could help streamline investments and accelerate investment flow in Indian startups, an official said as quoted in the report.

The Indian government launched its flagship Startup India initiative in 2016 to catalyse the startup ecosystem in the country and build an ecosystem for innovation and entrepreneurship.

As part of this initiative, the government also launched the SISFS and the Fund of Funds For Startups (FFS) scheme, along with credit guarantee scheme, to streamline capital requirements of startups at various stages of their business cycle.

Earlier this year, DPIIT launched the first edition of the ‘National Incubator Capacity Building Program’, a hands-on training programme to help startup incubators grow sustainably, under the government’s ‘Startup India’ initiative.

Since the inception of the Startup India initiative in 2016, the DPIIT has identified 99,380 entities till date.

This comes at a time when Indian startups are facing funding crunch amid several economic and geopolitical issues. Despite investors amassing over $22 Bn for Indian startups since last year, funding momentum in startups has yet to accelerate. According to Inc42 data, Indian startups have raised $6.1 Bn in funding across 528 deals this year (as of July 28, 2023), a far cry from the $19 Bn raised across 900 deals in the first half of 2022.

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