BENGALURU: Nearly 67,500 Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT)-recognised start-ups have at least one woman director, said the ministry of commerce and industry. As on June 30, 2024, the country has 1,40,803 recognised start-ups and since 2016, these recognised start-ups have created over 15.53 lakh direct jobs, the commerce ministry said on Friday.
In the last 6 months of this year, DPIIT has recognised 23,549 start-ups. In 2023 alone, there were 34,842 recognised start-ups. Maharashtra tops with 5,816 recognised start-ups, followed by Gujarat (3,295).
With an aim to encourage investments in the start-up ecosystem, the government launched the Startup India initiative on January 16, 2016. To promote start-ups, various programmes have been undertaken including Startup India Action Plan, Startup India Seed Fund Scheme (SISFS), Fund of Funds for Startups (FFS) Scheme and Startup India Hub, among others.
With a corpus of R10,000 crore, the government has established FFS to meet the funding needs of start-ups. DPIIT is the monitoring agency and Small Industries Development Bank of India (SIDBI) is the operating agency for FFS. Startup India Online Hub was launched in 2017 to discover, connect and engage with each other.
The Online Hub hosts startups, investors, funds, academic institutions, incubators, accelerators, government bodies and more. Recently in the Budget, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced that angel tax will be abolished for all investor classes.