Gujarat, Meghalaya and Karnataka have emerged as the best performer states in developing startup ecosystem for budding entrepreneurs, the third edition of the States’ Startup Ranking 2021 rankings released by the department for promotion of industry and internal trade (DPIIT) on Monday showed. Gujarat has now been recognized as the best performer for the third consecutive year.
Kerala, Maharashtra, Odisha and Telangana were categorised as top performers in the exercise which ranked states and union territories under five categories-best performers, top performers, leaders, aspiring leaders and emerging startup ecosystems.
“Why should we be satisfied becoming number three (in global startup ecosystem)? We should aspire to be number one in the world. Why should Silicon Valley have that advantage over us? Certainly our northern neighbours shouldn’t be number two. Atleast that we can all immediately agree on,” commerce and industry minister Piyush Goyal said while realising the ranking report.
He said that India has 70,809 startups of which 12,000-odd are registered on the Government eMarketplace and called for a weeding out process through third party audit of the country’s 92 incubators.
24 states and 7 Union territories (UTs) participated in the ranking exercise that showed significant improvement in the startup ecosystem in the country, and a higher diffusion of startup culture to smaller states. The rankings are based on the initiatives taken to develop the startup ecosystem for promoting budding entrepreneurs.
This year, the exercise assessed the states’ performance across seven reform areas divided into 26 action points.
This year, the exercise assessed the states’ performance across seven reform areas divided into 26 action points.
The minister said that in the next five years, the Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) will democratise e-commerce across India “so much so that we will have a probably a few thousand startups, maybe more… a few hundred unicorns”.
“What this ONDC will do is rather than three companies becoming hundred billion or trillion dollar companies, you’ll have a thousand companies each of a billion dollars…And then below those thousand companies which are unicorns, you have maybe a few hundred thousand companies who will not only survive the onslaught of the ecommerce but will actually grow their business and become job creators,” Goyal said.
Due to the impact of Covid-19, the period of consideration for the third edition of the States’ Startup Ranking was October 1, 2019-July 31, 2021.
Source Name:-Economic Times