“Make in India” and “Startup India” – Twin engines of economic growth
12 March 2021: “Make in India” and “Startup India” are the Twin engines of economic growth for India. These projects have the potential not only to take economic growth to a higher trajectory but also to provide employment to a large pool of our young labour force.
Make in India is an initiative was launched by Indian Government in September, 2014, to facilitate investment, foster innovation, building best in class infrastructure, and making India a hub for manufacturing, design, and innovation. It was one of the first ‘Vocal for Local’ initiatives that exposed India’s manufacturing domain to the world. Make in India initiative has made significant achievements and presently focuses on 27 sectors under Make in India 2.0.
On the other hand, Startup India is a flagship initiative of the Government of India, intended to build a strong eco-system for nurturing innovation and Startups in the country that will drive sustainable economic growth and generate large scale employment opportunities.
Government of India has established a Funds for Startups (FFS) with corpus of Rs.10,000 crores, to meet the funding needs of startups. DPIIT is the monitoring agency and Small Industries Development Bank of India (SIDBI) is the operating agency for FFS. The total corpus of Rs. 10,000 crores is envisaged to be provided over the 14th and 15th Finance Commission cycles.
Under the scheme, the Startup should be working towards innovation/ improvement of existing products, services and processes and should have the potential to generate employment/ create wealth. Startups are provided with an 80% rebate in filing of patents and 50% rebate in filling of trademark vis-a-vis other companies.
Moreover, DPIIT also conceived the National Startup Awards. The first edition of the Awards invited applications across 12 sectors, which were further sub-classified into a total of 35 categories. These 12 sectors were Agriculture, Education, Enterprise Technology, Energy, Finance, Food, Health, Industry 4.0, Space, Security, Tourism, categories and Urban Services. The applications for the ‘National Startup Awards 2020’ were hosted on the Startup India portal – www.startupindia.gov. in – through which a total of 1,641 applications were received from Startups across 23 States and 4 Union Territories.
The Startup India Yatra, an initiative that travels to Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities of India, has been launched to search for entrepreneurial talent and help develop Startup ecosystem. Startup Yatra has been conducted across 23 States in 236 districts impacting 78,346 aspiring entrepreneurs. A total of 1,424 incubation offers have been given to the startups as a result of this initiative.
