Our Bureau The Centre has nominated 28 non-official members for the Startup Advisory Council notified last year, including founders of top start-ups in the country such as Byju’s, Urban Company, Snapdeal and Ola Cabs.

The non-official members, who will have a term of up to two years, also include veterans who have grown and scaled companies in India, persons capable of representing interest of investors in start-ups, persons capable of representing interests of incubators and accelerators, representatives of associations of stakeholders of start-ups and representatives of industry associations, as per an official press note circulated by the Department for Promotion of Investments and Internal Trade (DPIIT) on Tuesday.

The Startup Advisory Council was notified in January 2020 to advise the government on measures needed to build a strong ecosystem for nurturing innovation and start-ups in the country. It is chaired by the Commerce and Industry Minister, while the nominees of the concerned Ministries/Departments/Organisations, not below the rank of Joint Secretary, are its ex-officio members.

Ideas to solutions

The Council is to support creative and innovative ideas through incubation and research and development to transform them into valuable products, processes or solutions to improve productivity and efficiency and create an environment of absorption of innovation in industry. It is also expected to suggest measures to facilitate public organisations to assimilate innovation with a view to improving public service delivery, promote creation and protection and commercialisation of intellectual property rights.

The non-official members include Byju Raveendran from Byju’s, Shradha Sharma from YourStory, Lizzie Chapman from ZestMoney, Abhiraj Singh from Urban Company, Kunal Bahl from Snapdeal, Deepak Garg from Rivigo Service, Bhavish Aggarwal from Ola Cabs, Krishna Kumar from Cropin, Sanjeev Bhikchandani from Info Edge India and Sridhar Vembu from Zoho Corp.

Others include Kris Gopalakrishnan from Axilor Ventures, Subba Rao Pavuluri from Ananth Technologies, Mohandas Pai from Aarin Capital Partners, Gopal Srinivasan from TVS Capital Funds, Ramesh Byrapaneni from Endiya Partners, Prashant Prakash from Accel, Vani Kola from Kalaari Capital, Manoj Kohli from Softbank India and Rajan Anandan from Sequoia Capital India.

Non-official members also include representatives from educational institutions and industry associations, such as Amitabha Bandyopadhyay from SIIC (IIT-Kanpur), Kunal Upadhyay from Startup Oasis (IIM-Ahmedabad), Renuka Ramnath from Indian Private Equity & Venture Capital Association, Venktesh Shukla from The IndUS Entrepreneurs (TiE), Sharad Sharma from Indian Software Product Industry RoundTable (iSPIRT), Debjani Ghosh from Nasscom, Uday Kotak from CII, Vineet Agarwal from Assocham and Uday Shankar from FICCI.

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