NEW DELHI: 20 private organizations, including Nasscom and iSprit, has been certified by the government as incubators under the Startup India Action Plan. The move will make it easy for the startups to grow their reach to incubators. As per the current scenario, only government-run 278 incubators are permitted to certify and recommend startups.
“There is a lack of right kind of incubators. We need to provide sector-specific services, which we are trying to do in our warehouses,” said Rajat Tandon, vice president, Nasscom. 20 private bodies pulled in by the government to act as incubators
Incubators provide a setup to startups where they are provided with space to operate and mentored to scale up their business to a certain level. The government is putting its efforts towards engaging private organizations that will mentor budding entrepreneurs. This will help in reducing the paucity of incubators and fill the gap.
“We will make this list available to startups, so there is a wider base of incubators available for them to reach out to,” a senior government official said. The previous month, 571 applications from startups were received by the Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion (DIPP) to avail the tax benefits announced under the Startup India Action Plan. Out of which, only 106 had the required documents. However, so far, only two startups could manage to get the tax and intellectual property rights-related benefits approved by the inter-ministerial board.
A monitoring committee headed by DIPP Secretary Ramesh Abhishek has been formed by DIPP 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.”
With a special focus on tier-II and III cities, DIPP has also started mapping incubation centers across the country.