Madhya Pradesh Youth To Receive Interest-Free Loans Up To $13.6K To Start Up

Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan announced that the youth of the state will be given loan upto $13.6K (INR 10 Lakh) without interest as seed capital for starting up their entrepreneurial journey..

While speaking at the Startup Conclave held on September 29 in Bhopal, Chouhan said that changes will be made in policies and arrangements will be made so that the government can purchase though startups for upto $41.06K (INR 30 Lakh) without tender.

Other key points highlighted during the conclave were:

• An Innovation Council will be formed in the state with an aim to make the state an entrepreneur network
• Incubation centres are being set up in all seven smart cities of the state – Bhopal, Indore, Ujjain, Gwalior, Jabalpur, Satna, and Sagar
• Incubation centres on Public-private partnership (PPP) model will be operating in certain selected colleges
• Aventure capital fund has been created to support the innovative ideas brought in by the people

The current announcement will also be linked with the Mukhya Mantri Yuva Udyami Yojana. The initiative was introduced by Madhya Pradesh government in 2014  in order to help spread the entrepreneurial culture among the youth and engage them in gainful employment.

Recently, in September 2018, the Kerala government had also announced a similar initiative where it increased the cap on direct purchase of software products, services and mobile app from the ventures cleared by the Kerala Startup Mission (KSUM) from $6.8K (INR 5 Lakh) to $27.3K (INR 20 lakh).

Madhya Pradesh: A Booming Startup Ecosystem

As of 2016, Madhya Pradesh was said to have more than 500 startups with majority of startups situated in Bhopal, Indore and working in IT and services category followed by ecommerce.

Some of the major startups in the state are, Wittyfeed, Bag2Bag, RackBank, MaalGaadi , My Sanika, My Child App, InkThemes, Bharat Calling, Ideata Analytics among many more.

Recently, in August, the Department of Industrial Policy & Promotion (DIPP) led Startup India programme organised the fifth Startup India Yatra in Madhya Pradesh, under which 71 startups received 110 incubation offers from seven incubators.

In 2016, digital payment services giant Paytm had signed memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the Madhya Pradesh State government to set up a back-end center in Jabalpur.

In order to support the startup ecosystem in the city of Indore, Inc42 also partnered with Amazon India and hosted the third instalment of its localised meetup series – BIGShift  in Indore in 2016. During the event, prominent startup founders, influencers, investors, and ecosystem enablers came together to engage and shared their knowledge on the right time to raise funding, challenges of team building etc.

At present, both the state governments and central governments are stepping up in order to develop the startup culture in the country and also help the budding entrepreneurs enter the space. As the Department of Industrial Policy & Promotion (DIPP) which is working under the Ministry of Commerce and Industry, issued the guidelines for the state startup ranking framework, the states are coming up with different strategies to boost their startup ecosystem.

Other states who are working aggressively here are Rajasthan, Karnataka, Gujarat, Chattisgarh and among others. Most recently. J&K amid political turbulence, also launched its startup policy which is quite encouraging for the budding entrepreneurs of the state.

[The development was reported by the pioneer]