No. Governments of
some states like Kerala and West Bengal had already, before Prime Minister
Narendra Modi’s announcement, taken
some concrete steps to providing entrepreneurs assistance for setting up and
running business successfully. Kerala decided to invest 1% of the state’s budget (approximately
INR 500 crore) in the nascent startups of the state. The West Bengal
government had tied up with IIM-Calcutta for training officials to go over each
district educating and assisting all prospective entrepreneurs with everything
they need to start their own ventures, with the target of 4000-5000 new
entrepreneurs along with helping existing ones. The state government in
collaboration with the Bengal National Chamber of Commerce & Industry also
created a non-profit institute called Enterprise Development Institute for
strengthening entrepreneurship with structured training and certification
programmes.
Even at the central
level, the Congress-led UPA government too took some steps in this regard. The
Prime Minister’s Employment Generation Programme instituted by Dr. Manmohan
Singh was a step in this direction, in which money was given for starting
micro enterprises in the manufacturing sector and the service sector (as you
can see here and here), and even earlier schemes have
existed like the Prime
Minister’s Rozgar Yojana, dating back to 1993. Also, while the Modi sarkar has sought to reduce
the patent fee by 80% for startups, an
exemption of up to 50% for them was already in existence. Thus, while this initiative may be
promoted as something very new altogether, in reality, it isn’t. It may also be
mentioned that back in 1993, the Indian Institute of Entrepreneurship to train
budding entrepreneurs was set up near Guwahati by the then Congress government.
Also, those
trying to promote ease of doing business and doing away with unnecessary
licensing procedures include even the AAP government in Delhi, which indeed has abrogated
many unnecessary regulatory hindrances to smooth functioning of business. Interestingly, a year before
Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the Startup India initiative, Dr. Kalam
had talked about inculcating entrepreneurial skills through the education system
and encouraging banks to be more startup-friendly.
