Startups meet Sitharaman, demand more support

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Saurabh Gupta | 29 Jul, 2016
To discuss the key challenges faced by Startups, the Ministry of Commerce & Industry Thursday organized a meeting of Commerce Minister Nirmala Sitharaman with around 30 Startups for their feedback and to discuss the key challenges faced by them.

Sitharaman says Government will hold to have all stakeholders of the Startup ecosystem on board in making India one of the best Startup destinations in the world.

Some of the issues that were raised related to making compliances easy, IPR pendency period, lack of prompt response from incubators for issuing recommendation letters, complicated paper work involved in all government compliances, tedious import/export procedures, need of clear definition of Aggregators under the Service tax among many others.

Some of the suggestions made by Startups were to have a checklist for all the state and central compliances on the Startup India portal, a discussion forum to be evolved for all the stakeholders of the Startup ecosystem to exchange ideas and companies should be asked to spend more on Startups as part of CSR activities.

They also suggested that, as has been done by the government, banks should also be asked to exempt the Startups from turnover and experience criteria to enable them to participate in the procurement process.

The participants mentioned the difficulties faced by them in interstate movement of goods. They suggested that all the states should be asked to take the declarations online and receive taxes online. They also suggested that maintaining manual registers for compliance under labor laws should be done away with.

They also mentioned that access of credit through banks should be simplified and the time taken should also be reduced. For easier compliance towards various rules and regulations they suggested that a handbook should be prepared and put on public domain.

In he address, the minister said, "The Startup India initiative is designed to foster innovation, create jobs and facilitate investment. Government is committed to make this initiative a scalable reality and to provide an environment for our Startups to thrive in. Since the launch of the Action Plan for the Startup India initiative considerable progress has been made. However, a lot remains to be done."

"The Ministry of Commerce and Industry believes the way forward is to have all the stakeholders on board to take the initiative forward and act as a facilitator for Startups to flourish," she added.

Secretary, DIPP informed that the capacities of IPR offices have been enhanced considerably in the last 6 months. This would reduce the time taken for examination of patent applications to 18 months by March 2018 compared to over 5 years now.

Similarly the time taken for examination of trademark applications will become 1 month by March 2017.

He also highlighted that the patent applications of Startup are eligible for expedited examination and reduced fee as per the revised patent rules.

In addition DIPP has provided a panel of facilitators who will provide free of cost facilitation to Startups for filing patent applications.

The Minster was very receptive to all the suggestions and she urged that Startups can approach the Government with any issue small or big.