If trending on social media is a yardstick to measure success, Start-up India announced its big arrival amid a dismal looking economic scene on Saturday.
If trending on social media is a yardstick to measure success, Start-up India announced its big arrival amid a dismal looking economic scene on Saturday.
As the day-long event started unfolding in front of the big jamboree studded with 'Who's Who' of corporate digital world at Vigyan Bhawan on Saturday, #StartUpIndia, #MakeINdiaWork and other related hashtags were topping the charts in the worldwide trending topics on tweeter.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi's dream scheme to replace India from a job seeker nation to a job creator one – Start-up India that he first announced from the ramparts of the Red Fort on August 15 last year had attracted a big crowd of start-up entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and angel investors to see what plan the government has in store for them.
Starting the day's event, Union finance minister Arun Jaitley did not disappoint them. Promising to roll out a red carpet for them, Jaitley announced, "We want to restrict the role of the state. Start-up India will give freedom from the State. The DIPP (department of industrial planning & promotion) will be a facilitator.
"We did well to break off from the licence raj in 1991, but it was only partial… This will be the final break from licence raj… Once the start-up movement picks up, it will be the eventual freedom from the state," said Jaitley wooing potential investors and wannabe entrepreneurs to work in India and feel the difference of a new friendly government that would be an enabler in their prospective ventures.
Expressing hope that somewhere potential entrepreneurs, especially in the Silicon Valley, are hearing him, Jaitley said, "We will create an environment so that you become a powerful name to reckon with."
Jaitley said start-ups could emerge as an alternate engine of growth at a time when the global economy posed several challenges.
Describing it as a 'Big Bang' moment for India, SoftBank chairman and chief executive Masayoshi Son, who promised a colossal investment of $ 10 billion in India, however, cautioned that the government needs to develop a robust mobile phone infrastructure and resolve slow Internet issues.
"If I rescale, I will scale up. What will $10 billion become, I don't know. If I have said that we will invest $10 billion in 10 years, we have invested $2 billion in a year. That's over pacing and I think we will accelerate," he said at the Start-up India conference here.
"I think mobile Internet is too slow. More spectrum allocation to the mobile carriers is needed so that they can have better mobile broadband," he said.
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