The government has authorized 20 private organisations, including Nasscom and iSprit, as incubators under the Startup India Action Plan. The move will help in growing the reach of incubators for upcoming startups.
By Baishakhi Dutta
Currently, under the Startup India action, only government-run 278 incubators are allowed to certify and recommend startups.
Rajat Tandon, Vice President of Nasscom opined that there is a dearth of right kind of incubators. He also mentioned that we need to administer sector-specific services, which Nasscom is trying to do in their way.
Incubators provide a set up where multiple startups are given space to operate and are tutored to scale up their business to a certain level. There is an insufficiency of incubators and to fill this gap, the government is trying to engage private organisations for providing mentor ship facilities to entrepreneurs.
Last month, the Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion (DIPP) received 571 applications from startups wan ting to avail the tax benefits announced in the Startup India Action Plan.
Of these, only 106 had the required documents -one of them being the incubator’s certificate qualifying them as an innovative business meeting all the other requirements of the `startup’ definition.
So far, only two startups have managed to get the approval of the inter-ministerial board for tax and intellectual property rights-related benefits.
DIPP has formed a monitoring committee headed by DIPP Secretary Ramesh Abhishek to take stock of the action plan’s implementation once a month.
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 as part of the Startup India Action Plan announced by PM Narendra Modi in January.
DIPP has also started mapping incubation centers across the country with a special focus on tier-II and III cities.
