Prominent Start-up Owners Meet Commerce Minister Smt. Nirmala Sitharaman

In an effort to boost the Startup ecosystem the commerce Ministry organised a meeting with 30 Startups for their feedback and also to further discuss the key challenges faced by them.

Smt. Nirmala Sitharaman , Minister of Commerce and Industries opened the discussion by stating that Government will have all stakeholders of the Startup ecosystem on board and make India one of the best Startup destinations in the world.

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Important points of the meeting:

• Government plans to provide an environment for our Startups to thrive in and make India one of the best Startup destinations in the world.
• The government is committed to make this initiative a scalable reality.
• Ever since the launch of the Action Plan for the Startup India initiative a lot of progress has been made. But still, a lot remains to be done.
• Ministry of Commerce and Industry wants to have all the stakeholders on board to take the initiative forward and act as a facilitator to flourish Startups.
• With the aim of the conducive Startup ecosystem, to discuss key concerns the Ministry is reaching out to all the stakeholders.

The minister urged the participants without any hesitation to write to the government on any issue and not wait for a meeting. Some of the issues that were raised in the meeting were related to making compliances easy, lack of prompt response from incubators for issuing recommendation letters,IPR pendency period, tedious import/export procedures, the complicated paperwork involved in all government compliances, need a clear definition of Aggregators under the Service tax among many others.

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Prominent start-up owners that met the commerce minister were -

1. Paytm’s Vice President Sudhanshu Gupta,
2. Suraj Saharan, Co-founder of Delhivery,
3. Ola’s Senior Director Anand Subramanium,
4. Anu Acharya, CEO of Mapmygenome,
5. Rivi Varghese, CEO and Co-founder of CustomerXPs.
6. Abhiraj Bhal, Co-founder of UrbanClap,
7. Nykaa.com’s CFO Sachin Parikh,

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Some of the suggestions made by Startups were--

• To have a checklist for all the central and state compliances on the Startup India portal.
• They also suggested that banks should also be asked to exempt the Startups from turnover and experience criteria so that they can participate in participate in the procurement process.
• The difficulties faced by startup owners like in interstate movement of goods.
• All the states should be asked to take the declarations online and receive taxes online
• Maintaining manual registers for compliance under labour laws should be removed .

On the part of the MinIster, she very clearly listened their problems and she was receptive to all the suggestions and urged that Startups can approach the Government with any small or big issue.

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What decided in the meeting-

• The Startup India portal will contain the details of the compliances of Central and State laws expected of a Startup.
• Various issues raised by the startups pertaining to them would be taken by DIPP with the concerned ministries/regulator.
• As to Startups can take up their issues directly with ministry secretary, DIPP to facilitate the meeting of various Startups with the concerned departments.
• To know which subject relates to which ministry or regulator DIPP would explore the possibility of developing an app which would enable Startups to know things clearly.
• To guide Startups on various compliances and the processes involved the Department would also prepare a handbook.