Zone Startups India, the international start-up accelerator located in the Bombay Stock Exchange tower, Mumbai, is home to nearly 106 start-ups. About 40 of these have raised over $35 million in funding and have grown without taking any help from the Centre. The start-ups here feel the various schemes by the government to promote new entrepreneurs is not relevant to them.

“I am happy that I wasn’t a part of any government programme but had the opportunity to work in an environment where you can just focus on creating innovative products,” said an entrepreneur who didn’t want to be named.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi had, in January last year, launched the StartUp India initiative to promote entrepreneurship across the country so that it would help in job creation in the long run. Under this, a ₹10,000 crore start-up fund was set up. A tax holiday was also announced for start-ups formed after April 2016. So far, only a handful of about 5-8 start-ups have qualified for these schemes.

Identify job creators Nimesh Mehta, founder of data analytics start-up Rock Metric, said that though his company had not applied for the schemes, he had no regrets.

“This is not how you create jobs by creating funds and opening start-up villages. The important point is to have a vision and identify the sectors that can be potential job creators,” Mehta said, adding that automation, machine learning and artificial intelligence are the future and the government should work towards making India the next hub for automation. “Start-up programmes should not be treated as MNREGA programmes. Tax payers’ money should be used for innovation only," he said.

Neerav Parekh, founder of data analytics company vPhrase, which has bagged clients such as HDFC Bank and Dun & Bradstreet in just a year, said the three-year tax holiday had no meaning. “No start-up makes money in the first three years. In fact, if the start-up wants to grow big it cannot wish to be profitable in the initial years but reinvest in growing the business," Parekh said.

He felt there were enough investors and incubators in the country, providing space to the start-ups and helping them raise funds, therefore the government should not be in this space.

Better execution needed Manish Kumar, an investor and co-founder of start-up exchange firm Grex, said that while most of the measures were good on intent, a lot needed to be done on execution.

“One of the critical bottlenecks is the start-up registration itself — the number of start-up registrations has not been encouraging and thus only a few could access benefits such as tax holidays and reduced patent filing charges. To make it more widespread, it is necessary to have more touch points where people can reach out to understand the requisites and apply,” he said.

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