Yogi government’s new startup policy is game changer, says official spokesperson
By VIRENDRA SINGH RAWAT
LUCKNOW, Dec 29 (The CONNECT) - A day after Prime Minister Narendra Modi termed India among the top global startup and unicorn hubs, Uttar Pradesh on Wednesday asserted it was aiming for the country’s numero uno startup slot.
The State has claimed a nearly 20-fold increase in the number of startups in UP since 2017. The state government maintained UP has accounted for a sizeable portion of the country’s collective startups basket, especially in the National Capital Region (NCR) districts.
Addressing the 54th convocation of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kanpur on Tuesday, Modi said India was the 2nd largest and 3rd largest startup and unicorn hub respectively even as he lauded the IITs for their notable contribution.
The PM informed India was home to 75 unicorns, while the startups numbered almost 50,000, of which 10,000 startups had cropped up in the last six months.
Meanwhile, a UP government spokesperson said the state was fast emerging as a startup hub owing to the proactive ‘doing business’ policies of the current dispensation. “The number of startups has witnessed a 20-fold rise since 2017. This has generated employment opportunities for tens of thousands of people, especially youth,” the he said.
While Noida leads the UP startup tally with more than 1,500 units, Ghaziabad and Lucknow account for 600 and 575 entities respectively. Interestingly, the comparatively laggard Purvanchal (Eastern UP) and Bundelkhand regions collectively comprise nearly 1,800 startups.
Against 200 startups, he said, registered in UP till 2017, the number of startups has overshot the 3,800 mark after the promulgation of the new startup policy, which provides subsidy on capital investment towards machinery and land.
To leverage the startup potential in the pharmaceutical sphere, the Yogi Adityanath government had amended the policy in October.
The UP government has already announced plans to establish 100 new incubation centres and 10,000 new startups in varied fields including education, health, agriculture, textile, IT etc.
