Envisioner | August 2019 Envisioner August 2019 | Page 11

Listed below are some of the meas-
ures (not exhaustive) that were
recently undertaken by the gov-
ernment to further the start-up eco-
system of our country:
HOW INDIA IS RAPIDLY BECOMING A
START-UP FRIENDLY COUNTRY:
In the words of Sanjay Nath,
co-founder of Blume Ventures, “In-
dian entrepreneurs never lacked
imagination. But, in the last 10 years,
the best talent was always limited to
corporations. Now, that gap is being
bridged. This reverse flow of talent
is the most inspiring thing about
the B2B start-up sector right now.”
Clearly, the youth of today is clearly
not dissuaded from working inde-
pendently, from building something
more valuable, economical, and sus-
tainable for society. The fact that the
Indian government has promoted
establishing a start-up culture and
has been bringing in a flurry of new
programmes and opportunities, has
resulted in maximising the poten-
tial of these entrepreneurs and help
them in innovation and nurturing. • START-UP INDIA (2016)
Aimed at boosting entrepreneurship
by bank financing new ventures, the
Start-up India initiative has sought
to create an environment wherein
new start-ups can evolve and grow
without any obstacles by introduc-
ing measures like online recogni-
tion of start-ups, , Facilitated Pat-
ent filing, Easy Compliance Norms,
Relaxed Procurement Norms, incu-
bator support, Start-up India Learn-
ing Programme innovation-focused
programmes for students, funding
support, tax benefits and addressing
of regulatory issues.
The next big push came in the early
90s, which saw the end of the License
Raj and Indian economy opened it-
self to the entire world, both literally
and figuratively and the entrepre-
neurial ecosystem has evolved ever
since. But if the 90s saw the era of
restrictions ending, it was in 2008
when India witnessed its first, of
what could be called, a full-fledged
start-up revolution. The global re-
cession of 2008 saw a large number
of business houses laying off their
employees, a major chunk of them
being India’s IT professionals, who
were forced to search for different
opportunities to stay in the game. It
was then, that modern India’s most
creative minds decided to come out
of their shells of mediocrity to cre-
ate something endearing. And India
hasn’t looked back ever since.
• ATAL INNOVATION MISSION
Acting as an enforcer of Start-up
India, the Atal Innovation mission
was established within the Nation-
al Institution for Transforming India
(NITI) to “provide an innovation pro-
motion platform involving acade-
micians, and drawing upon nation-
al and international experiences to
foster a culture of innovation,re-
search, and development”. This in-
cludes building up Atal Incubation
Centres (AICs) with an aim to build
innovative start-up businesses as
scalable and sustainable enterpris-
es.
In a recent move, the Central Board
of Direct Taxes (CBDT) announced
that Angel Tax will no longer be lev-
ied on start-ups and Angel Inves-
tors, in an effort to boost funding of
various start-up ventures.
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