Govt Handholding StartUps, Not Micromanaging

Piyush Goyal, Union minister of commerce and industry talks about role of youth, incubation centres in non-metros and Centre's hands-off approach in an interview to Neeraj Thakur and Pushpita Dey.

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What do you think will be the role of start-ups in the Viksit Bharat goal?

I think the youth of the country have a huge role to play in achieving that goal. The prime minister believes that our young men and women, particularly with the huge talent and skill that they have, and their aspirations for a better quality of life is going to drive the country to higher levels of prosperity. We already have grown from 400 start-ups to 1,50,000 in the past nine years.

But we believe that as more technology comes into play, we will probably achieve a million start-ups in the next 10 years. They will provide the impetus to job creation, to entrepreneurship.

What is the government doing to promote start-ups beyond metros?

It's a collective effort between the Centre and the states. More and more states are encouraging start-ups. Today we have 95% of the districts in the country having one or more start-ups. Certainly, Mumbai-Pune, Bengaluru-Hyderabad, Delhi-Gurgaon regions will obviously attract more start-ups. The venture capitalists are there. There is an existing ecosystem.

But from the point of view of the government, we started with the Atal Tinkering Labs, progressed to incubation centres. We have a thousand incubation centres all across the country. I visited an incubation centre by Deshpande Foundation in Hubli.