A total of 30 States and UTs have participated in this exercise whose last date for submission of documents was 30th April, the Commerce Ministry said on Tuesday.

With the aim to foster competitiveness and to propel the States and Union Territories to work proactively towards promotion of their Startup eco-systems, the States Startup Ranking Framework was launched by Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion (DIPP) on 6th February 2018.

This was also targeted at facilitating States/UTs to identify, learn and replicate good practices from each other and for bringing to fore, their own progress in the regard.

As a run-up to this, DIPP actively engaged with State and UT Governments over the past several weeks to help them prepare and participate in the States Startup Ranking exercise.

Two rounds of video conferences were organised by DIPP with all the States and UTs in the month of March and April 2018. A dedicated team from DIPP also visited all States and UTs to conduct ranking awareness and capacity building workshop.

In order to provide exposure to State/UT officials about the process of developing Startup ecosystem in their respective regions, 3 knowledge exchange workshops were conducted at leading incubators in the country.

The workshops were organised at T-Hub, Hyderabad on 9th April, 2018, iCreate, Ahmedabad on 11th April, 2018 and Sunrise Incubation Tower, Vishakhapatnam on 16th April, 2018.

There was a lot of enthusiasm shown by the States and Union Territories in these workshops which were attended in large numbers.