A file photo of commerce and industry minister Nirmala Sitharaman. Photo: Ramesh Pathania/Mint
New Delhi: The Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion (DIPP) will soon hold talks with other government departments to address specific concerns raised by start-ups at a meeting with commerce and industry minister Nirmala Sitharaman.
After the meeting, held on Thursday, Sitharaman said she had asked DIPP, which is driving the ‘Startup India’ programme, to hold inter-ministerial meetings to address the issues.
“Start-up founders spoke about the difficulties they are facing relating to various ministries and what is it that they want the government to do further. The concerns raised include taxation, period for which they are getting tax relief, and role of regulators. They also talked about issues related to compliance. I have instructed the DIPP secretary to hold meetings with ministries concerned to address these issues,” she added.
Anu Acharya, founder of Mapmygenome, a molecular diagnostics company, said start-up founders asked the department to provide all start-up-related information at one place and that accessing regulatory information was the biggest challenge they faced.
“The officials assured to do something quickly on this front,” she added.
Sachin Parikh, chief financial officer at online cosmetics company Nykaa, said the government should restrict itself to defining policy and leave it to the start-ups to execute it.
He said the government’s Rs.10,000 crore fund of funds has moved slowly because of bureaucracy. “Bigger focus should be on crowdfunding of start-ups,” he added.
The DIPP has recently done away with the need for entrepreneurs to get approvals from the inter-ministerial board in order to access benefits under the ‘Start-up India’ initiative. Now start-ups need to be certified by the inter-ministerial board only for a three-year tax break.
For other benefits such as faster and cheaper patent examination and accessing funding from the fund of funds, start-ups only need a certificate from the DIPP.
[“Source-Livemint”]
