“Government is Open to Suggestions on StartUp India By All Means”: Abhishek Ramesh, Secretary, DIPP

The Private Equity and Venture Capital Association held an Annual India Alternative Conclave at The Grand, Vasant Kunj in New Delhi on 6th March, 2017. The conclave is a two-day event which witnessed a celebrated guest-list including Shri Jayant Sinha, the Honourable Minister of State for Civil Aviation, Gopal Srinivasan, Chairman &Managing Director, TVS Capital & Chairman, IVCA.

The day began with the key note remark by Harish HV, Partner, Grant Thorton India LLP, addressing the Private Equity Investors present at the event. He spoke about the huge responsibility they held as the investor community in India, of discovering, funding, exiting at the right time and passing the torch to the next round of investors.

A session following that reviewed role of the Private Capital. It included eminent panelists like Renuka Ramnath, Founder, MD & CEO of Multiples Alternate Asset Management, Sanjeev Krishna, Leader, Deal and Private Equity, PWC India.

Subsequently, an interesting and engrossing panel discussion happened around –Startup India Reform & Report Launch. Most significantly, Ramesh Abhishek, Secretary of Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion (DIPP), Saurabh Srivastava, Padma Shri, Chairman, India Angel Network, Rajat Tandon, President, IVCA, Sri Rajan, Chairman, Bain & Company India; Rehan Yar Khan, MP, Orios Venture Partners; Vaibhav Parikh, Partner Nishith Desai Associates together shared the stage and unveiled the report by IVCA.

In the mid-session the report was released was which had several suggestions and recommendations for the government’s scheme Startup India Campaign in the fund’s context and compliance too.

The Bharat Navodaya – Startup India Reform Launch & Discussion happened to very detailed one where Vaibhav Parikh put forth the flavor of the recommendations in the book, like he said, “There are many suggestions which we have recommended that require a change like the Femma compliance, the compliances on raising funds, it absolutely does not make any sense to get valuation done every time a company raises investment. To me policies should have some reason and be as scientific as possible that don’t put unnecessary pressure on the startup founders to leave there companies development and focus on adhering to compliances.”

Against which Ramesh Abhishek presented his side of views, he said, “I have had a chance to review the report, and I found some recommendations to be extremely helpful. This is a time when the government is highly sensitized towards the innovators hence, relaxations will follow in all the segments like the five year clause has been extended up to eight years. Similarly, out of 200 startups only 10 were selected so far for the tax benefits, now I have assigned the task to a committee to re-look in to this matter. We also want to actually set milestones for each year to achieve a quantitative growth as in 2018-19 and so on. We are also working on the idea of guaranteeing the whole investment corpuses rather than approving small quantum of individual loans. The government is also looking at setting up virtual startup hubs or one-stop shop, with databases from associations like TiE which shall be a big value addition for the startup ecosystem. Off-lately as many as 15 states in the country have come up with startup policies, earlier when we started we had only 4. For setting up great infrastructure however we would require the cooperation of private partners along with the government, as there is only so much the government can facilitate.”

The session saw great enthusiasm with audience’s participation and a power-point presentation of the Startup India Reform & Report Launch. The presentation show cased a flowchart of the basic structure of policy framework recommended – with 5S’: ‘Sarai’ (seamless and hassel-free); ‘Saadhan’(funding & liquidity); ‘Saahas’ (the courage of risk-taking) and ‘Salaah’(support ecosystem).