In January 2016, Prime Minister, Mr. Narendra Modi launched Start-up India initiative to establish a strong innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem in the country and promote start-up society. The department which supervises the initiative is the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT) in the Ministry of Commerce and Industry.

In June 2021, the DPIIT announced that the Start-up India initiative has recognized 50,000 start-ups as of June 4, 2021 which has impacted creating 5.5 lakh employments in the country.

In a statement, DPIIT stated, “The recognized start-ups under Start-up India initiative , are distributed across 623 districts. In India, there is at least one start-up in each State and UT. To support start-ups, 30 States and UTs have announced specific Start-up policies. Key states having the highest number of start-ups are Maharashtra, Karnataka, Delhi, Uttar Pradesh and Gujarat.”

According to DPIIT, the duration took to add 10,000 start-ups was 180 days, as compared to 808 days for adding the first 10,000 at the start of the initiative. It added, “In FY21, > 16,000 start-ups were recognised, up from 743 start-ups in FY17.”.

Under the Start-up India policy, entrepreneurs have opportunities to benefit across a range of areas such as fiscal & infrastructural support, laws and regulations guiding to a rise in start-up ecosystem growth.

According to DPIIT, “The recognized start-ups have impacted substantially to employment generation. Nearly 48,093 start-ups have reported 5,49,842 jobs, with 11 number of average employees per start-up. In FY21, ~ 1.7 lakh jobs were created by recognized start-ups.”

Key sectors which reported the highest number of registered start-ups are food processing, application development, product development, business support and IT consulting services. According to a statement, nearly 45% of the start-ups have women entrepreneur in their leadership teams, that is expected to drive more women entrepreneurs to transform their visions into start-ups.

DPIIT stated, “Start-up India at DPIIT has acted a vital part in boosting the key pillars recognized for our start-up economy. Financing opportunities to start-ups have been boosted via the Fund of Funds Scheme with an overlay of Rs. 10,000 crore (US$ 1.37 billion) and the lately introduced Start-up India Seed Fund Scheme (SISFS) with an outlay of Rs. 945 crore (US$ 129.38 million).”