Commerce and industry minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Thursday met founders and senior executives from as many as 28 start-ups who sought tax concessions for a longer period and easier compliance.
The start-ups that took part in the meeting include Ola, Paytm, Practo, mapmygenome, Delhivery, Urbanclap and CarDekho.
“We were keen to know their views on how their start-up activities are going on, their expectations from the government, the difficulties that they face. The difficulties may be relating to various ministries…what is it that they want us to do further,” Sitharaman told reporters after meeting the budding entrepreneurs.
She said DIPP secretary Ramesh Abhishek will ensure that meetings with other departments are held as a follow-up of Thursday’s meet to concerns relating to various sectors, including pharmaceuticals.
The DIPP will soon come up with a list of the rules that start-ups have to comply with, in a bid to increase the level of awareness as well as compliance levels.
An e-pharma start-up voiced concerns about curbs on online sales of medicines without prescriptions, which are preventing entrepreneurs to invest in this space.
A senior DIPP official said: “We will follow all the issues with respective ministries and departments. Most of them talked about reducing the compliance burden in areas like environment, labour and inter-state issues. But many matters were beyond start-ups.”
Mapmygenome CEO Anu Acharya said in order to promote start-ups, the government must make the issue of compliance simpler. It’s also true that there are issues which have to be addressed at the states’ level, she added.
Allinnov Research and Development director S Sundarpaul said: “Creating a single window system for start-ups will help them a lot.”
Start-ups also sought increasing the time limit of offering tax holidays. As such, the industries ministry has already asked the finance ministry to increase the period from the current three to seven years.
